The More I Learn, the Less I Know

This young woman has come to appreciate a Western influence in China. In this photo she enjoys a meal at McDonald's.

November 5, 1999
Web posted at: 3:24 p.m. EST (2024 GMT)

By Dan Beuttner

While I won't call Marco Polo a fraud, I will speak for the tens of thousands of online explorers who joined us on AsiaQuest and say that Marco Polo never went to China.

As we traveled 2500 miles (4025 km) from Kashgar to Beijing, we noted that Marco Polo's book recorded many details correctly. Like him, we saw jade in Hotan, goiters in Yarkand, a reclining Buddha in Zhangye and the vast emptiness of the Taklamakan Desert. But we also noticed he got many details wrong (like the length of the reclining Buddha) or missed them all together (like the Great Wall and chopsticks). We confirmed that his stated route and timeline were impossible to achieve. We also noted that Marco Polo never appears in Chinese records of the time.

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Our job as the team in China was to gather clues and make observations. Our online collaborators considered the evidence, interacted with great Marco Polo experts like Harry Rutstein and Frances Wood and decided. In the end, more than two-thirds of the 10,000 respondents said he never made it to China.

But that doesn't mean he didn't make a major mark on history. Regardless of how his Description of the World got written, it sparked the imagination of millions of Westerners, including Christopher Columbus. As one Chinese grade-school teacher put it, "He began the exchange of goods and ideas between the East and the West."

We like to think that AsiaQuest continued that tradition.

The Marco Polo mystery gave our team an engaging purpose to travel across China. On our way, we also looked at the history, culture, modern life, and environment of China.

In five weeks the only wildlife our biologist, Christina Allen, observed was a solitary hare on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Meanwhile, she found that burning coal and the dramatic increase in automobile use are further degrading the environment of one of the world's biggest polluters.

Through the stories of the kids we profiled, we discovered that China's one-child policy is indeed working at controlling China's population and that China's children seem to work harder and study harder than their American counterparts). Mirroring the larger Chinese population, they ranged from the fiercely traditional (like 14 year old Yosuf, a Muslim Uighur) to the fiercely ambitious (like 11-year-old Beijing native, Jasmine). Their willingness to speak with us reflected China's trend towards openness, which cracked the floodgates of Western influence. Jasmine, for example, has seen Titanic seven times and watches MTV at home.

In 20 years the income of the average Chinese person has tripled. You look around in Beijing and it seems that everyone has a cell phone pressed to their ear; in some neighborhoods there's literally a McDonalds on every block. According to a recent Gallup Poll, a third of Beijingers between the ages of 18 and 29 say they've used the Internet. American companies like Kodak, GM and Microsoft are pouring money and expertise into this country.

In western China, the clash between traditional Uighur society and 20th-century politics is apparent. In this photo Mao meets a Uighur in western China.

But prosperity comes at a price. While China's government focused on economic development, people's spiritual development has suffered. The result is that as many as 100 million Chinese have clamored to the questionable Falun Gong sect, and many cultural relics from Buddhism's heyday are deteriorating. John Fox found open caves with ancient Buddhist paintings. Vandals had scratched out all the eyes. Farmers near the ancient city of Gaochang still haul away 1,000-year-old bricks to make walls for their fields.

But what do I know? Towards the end of our journey I met a pensive, mildly anti-American businessman on the train to Beijing. He was still sore about the bombing of the embassy in Belgrade and America's blockade of China's entrance into the World Trade Organization. We sparred a bit, each defending our respective countries. Finally, we concluded, as every political conversation must, that it's governments that breed discontent among people, not people themselves.

I told him about our project, that we reach a couple of million school kids, and he became very solemn. He said, "You must paint an honest portrait of China for those kids."

I realized then for the first time how totally unequipped I am to do this. I could look at one of dozen sooty factories we saw and see another terrible source of pollution while he could look at the same factory and say: "That's the most productive rubber factory in Inner Mongolia." I could go to the dining car, look at the greasy greens and worms of fried pork and say, "YUK!" Meanwhile, most of the people in second class would have been overjoyed to drop their sunflower seeds and sit down to such a nice meal.

Five weeks here has taught me only one thing for sure. It's the only absolute truth that a foreign visitor (including Marco Polo, had he come) can come away with: the more you learn about China, the more you realize you don't know.

Pedals Up!

Dan