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SCMP Reporter

TWO adventurers have just retraced Marco Polo's first journey to China.

  New Yorkers Denis Belliveau and Frances O'Donnell were handed the keys to the city of Venice when they ended their two-year journey marking the 700 th anniversary of Marco Polo's expedition.

  They claim to be the first to complete the route in its entirety, having followed the same path recorded by the Venetian adventurer in The Travels of Marco Polo.

  The journey took them through 15 countries and six war zones, as well as countless ports on the seaward journey back from India to Venice.

  Belliveau, a photographer, and his writer companion, O'Donnell, are to publish a photographic account of their expedition and embark on a lecture tour of the United States.

  They travelled on horseback, camel, donkey-cart, bicycle, jeep and truck - but not by air.

  'We felt that to stick to the spirit of Marco Polo we had to stay on the ground,' O'Donnell said.

  She said that, in China, they had visited all 42 places mentioned in Marco Polo's journal.

   But, ironically, a controversial new book published this year to coincide with the anniversary of Marco Polo's glorious homecoming in 1295 has claimed the adventurer made up much of his story.

  The myth that he introduced pasta to Italy from China is said to be nonsense by Dr Frances Wood, curator of the British Library's Chinese section.

  She also questioned whether Marco Polo ever reached China.

  His claim to have visited Japan was dismissed long ago and Dr Wood noted that in all of his tales of strange Chinese cities and sea monsters in A Description of the World, he made no mention of bound feet on women, tea drinking or even the Great Wall.

   By contrast, Odoric of Pordenone, who travelled to China 30 years after Marco Polo's homecoming, wrote a graphic description of feet-binding.

  More extraordinary is that Marco Polo allegedly spent 17 years in China without any apparent financial support.

     The Venetian claimed to have been appointed governor of Yangzhou, but there is no mention of him in the records apart from a name Bor Lor.

   Some believe this could be a corruption of Polo, but sceptics consider it to be a Mongol name.



Explorers follow in Marco Polo's footsteps