Marco Polo and 'The Travels...'

We’ve now reached the sixtieth anniversary of the original transmission of Marco Polo. To mark the moment, I’m looking at how John Lucarotti used Polo’s own account of his expeditions when writing the serial.

Hailing from Venice, Marco Polo travelled widely through Asia for over 20 years in the late thirteenth century and became the first European to visit Cathay (China). Most commonly known as The Travels of Marco Polo, his account of his journeys (actually written from Polo’s notes by romance writer Rustichello of Pisa) was published in old French around 1300.

The Travels was John Lucarotti’s main source when writing Marco Polo for Doctor Who, although he presents one journey amalgamating elements from throughout the book. He also omits certain aspects altogether, notably Polo’s father and uncle, with whom he travelled. Here I want to highlight a few of the notable passages from the book which inform Lucarotti’s script. There are many English translations of The Travels but I am using the Penguin version by Ronald Latham, first published in 1958 – simply because it’s the one I found in a charity shop many years ago!

Marco Polo opens high in the Himalayas, at the plain of Pamir, known to travellers as the ‘roof of the world’. In The Travels, Polo explains that the plain “is said to be the highest place in the world” and that because of its great cold “fire is not so bright here nor of the same colour as elsewhere, and food does not cook well.” In Lucarotti’s script this becomes Polo noting that the soup he has provided is “not too warm, but the cold here is so intense it even robs a flame of its heat.” It’s a neat deployment of Polo’s genuine observation to create an opportunity for Ian to deliver a brief science lesson about altitude.

Later, Polo relates how, at the Khan’s court, he had “seen Buddhist monks make cups of wine fly through the air unaided and offer themselves to the Great Khan’s lips.” In The Travels, Polo reports how Bakhshi (Tibetan and Kashmiri enchanters) “contrive by their enchantment and their art that the full cups rise up of their own accord from the floor on which they have been standing and come to the Great Khan without anyone touching them.” Although Polo assures the reader of the story’s truth, he doesn’t claim to have witnessed it directly, unlike in Doctor Who.

The 16-year-old Ping-Cho, being escorted by Polo to marry an ancient official, is inspired by a prologue to The Travels which relates how the real Polo escorted the 17-year-old princess Kokachin to be wedded to a distant and recently widowed ruler. The journey took years and the ruler had died by the time they arrived. However, unlike Ping-Cho, Kokachin was married to the ruler’s young son instead. We can infer a significant age gap between the bride and the originally intended groom.

In Marco Polo, when the travellers encounter the ‘singing’ sands of the Gobi Desert during a sandstorm, Polo explains that “Sometimes, it sounds like musical instruments being played; the clashing of drums and cymbals. I’ve heard it sound like a great many people talking as they travelled across the desert. It can also be like a familiar voice calling your name.” This is drawn directly from The Travels, though the text makes no explicit connection with sandstorms. Instead, Polo reports that at night, if a rider becomes isolated:

“he hears spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes, indeed, they even hail him by name. Often these voices make him stray from the path, so that he never finds it again. And in this way many travellers have been lost and have perished.”

Polo reports further types of auditory hallucination, occurring in daytime also, with the sounds of “the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms.”

Later, Ping-Cho’s story of Alaodin*, his band of killers, the paradise he created for them and their defeat after the three-year siege by Hulagu, derives from a lengthy passage in The Travels. However, the words ‘hashish’ and ‘hashashin’ do not appear in The Travels, and other sources suggest that the popular theory – quoted by Ian in Marco Polo – that the word ‘assassin’ derives from ‘hashashin’ is a myth.

Lucarotti has Ian suggest to Polo the use of bamboo to frighten off a bandit attack, explaining: “If we throw it on the fire, it’ll expand and blow up. It’s a terrifying noise.” In fact, Polo was well aware of this property of bamboo, having written of its use in keeping wild animals away:

“This country [Tibet] produces canes of immense size and girth… Merchants and other travellers who are passing through this country at night use these canes as fuel because, when they are alight, they make such a popping and banging that lions and bears and other beasts of prey are scared away in terror…”

He goes on to suggest that these bangs can be heard up to ten miles away and cause great terror amongst horses and travellers unaccustomed to them.

The description in Marco Polo of how the messenger Ling-Tau travels great distances at speed mixes two different types of messenger described in The Travels. The book explains that every 25-30 miles (sometimes further) a riding messenger finds a posting station where he changes horses, having warned of his arrival by blowing a horn. Lucarroti has the horse changes every three miles with bells signalling the rider’s approach. However, in The Travels these details pertained to foot-slogging messengers, who wore bells and ran between stations at three-mile intervals. It specifies that a mounted messenger could manage 200 or 250 miles per day, even up to 300 – the distance given in Marco Polo – in cases of “extreme urgency”.

When Polo tells Ian that he has been surprised to see “a stone which burned”, which Ian identifies as coal, Lucarotti was reflecting Polo’s surprised report in The Travels that “throughout the province of Cathay there is a sort of black stone, which is dug out of veins in the hillsides and burns like logs.” He goes on to explain that it burns better and longer than wood and is used all over Cathay.

We can see that Lucarotti drew heavily on Marco Polo’s Travels but also allowed himself a measure of artistic licence in turning the unwieldy travelogue into the basis of an exciting adventure for the Doctor and friends. Quite right too.

Images © BBC

This is a slightly updated version of an article originally published in Panic Moon in December 2013

*Spelling from The Travels. I haven’t seen Lucarotti’s original script but he uses ‘Ala-eddin’ in his novelisation.

2024 Addendum:

There’s a mildly interesting reason why this subject featured in the fanzine in December 2013. That issue reviewed the recovered episodes of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear, which had been released to fans the previous month. A persistent rumour suggested Marco Polo had also been recovered.

While putting the fanzine together I left a space into which a last-minute look at the recovered Marco Polo could be slotted should it suddenly be released before publication, and sourced an excellent illustration to accompany it. But I knew the chances of this occurring were fairly low so I penned this article to use the space and fit the illustration in the event there was no happy news – and, of course, there wasn’t.

The illustration was a beautiful painting by Daryl Joyce depicting Polo’s caravan traversing the Himalayas (see it here). In reference to Polo’s desire to return home but also, more crucially, to the ongoing hope that an announcement of Marco Polo’s recovery was imminent, I captioned it: “Marco Polo’s caravan at the roof of the world. But is it on its way home?” I also thought that, should Marco Polo’s recovery be announced shortly after the fanzine was published, I would at least have cryptically hinted at it.

Polo did eventually get home to Venice. The episodes of Doctor Who that he inspired remain absent.