"In the year 1260 two enterprising Venetian merchants, the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, set out from Constantinople on a voyage to the Orient. The train of adventures that led them to the court of the Great Khan Kubilai at Peking, then back to Europe, is related in the prologue of this book. They left for China then once more. For this second mission, the brothers Polo were accompanied by Niccolo's son Marco, then a lad of seventeen. The book about his adventures has been most familiar to English readers as The Travels of Marco Polo. It was called in the preface to the reading public at the end of the thirteenth century a 'description of the world.' It was in fact a description of a very large part of the world - from the Arctic to Java, from Zanzibar to Japan - and a surprisingly large part of it from first-hand observation. Some stretches of the trail Marco Polo blazed were trodden by no other European foot for over 600 years - not, perhaps, till the opening of the Burma Road during the last war. And the task of putting it on the map, in the most literal sense, is not yet complete. The present translation is intended to provide a straightforward and readable version, related as closely as possible to modern knowledge, and to acquaint today's reader with the fascinating situation in the Near and Far East, enabling him to place present-day events in that region in a historical perspective."--Jacket.