It has been our experience over years of traveling that the poorer people are, the more willing they are to help foreigners, and the more generous they are. I know it’s a cliché, but it seems to be founded in truth as well. Our experiences in this field and over the years have been numerous. I can reasonably imagine that, at the end of the 13th century, this would have also been the case when Marco Polo joined his father and uncle on their route eastwards. Otherwise, a journey like this wouldn’t have been possible.
Marco Polo didn’t discover the East. People have been traveling between Europe and Asia since prehistoric times. We know how far east Alexander the Great travelled in antiquity. Since the 3rd century BCE, Chinese silk was a luxury product in Rome, as Roman glassware was in China. These worlds not only knew of each other’s existence. They were connected by means of trade, and through some scarce individuals who managed to travel between both territories. Trade routes between Rome and China were indirect and partly overseas, mainly because of the Parthian and Kushan kingdoms forming a buffer between the two empires.
The kingdom of Kushan near Alexandria/Bucephalus in the actual North-eastern Afghan Badakhshan area, formed a buffer between the two empires. After a one year stay in Kushan – probably because he suffered from tuberculosis – Marco Polo traveled from here over the Hindu Kush mountains and through the Wakhan valley to Kashgar in North-western China. This map shows the trade routes between East and West in the 1st century CE.
– Map licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
In the Middle Ages, the ongoing hostility between Christianity and Islam was another reason that made direct trade between East and West impossible. As a result, in Europe very little was known about the East. What the Polo’s did was nothing more than an attempt to establish a direct link between these two worlds. Marco was the first to write down his insights and experiences in his book Il Milione, which immediately became very popular. What he really discovered was that, in the Middle Ages, the East was technically more developed than the Western world.
Not in the least on the level of mechanics. Any overlander knows what a differential is. Knowing when to block the differentials of your vehicle is one of the basics of driving a 4×4. Few people know that the principle of the differential was documented in detail by the Chinese mechanical engineer Ma Yun in the first half of the 3rd century CE. The first mention of the machine’s existence even dates back to the 11th century BCE. The mechanism was applied to the shinansha or south-pointing chariot, a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by horses, with a pointing figure on top.
The figure continued to point south even when the chariot took a bend. It did so by means of a differential. The mechanism worked flawlessly, for sure, but it was probably far from precise enough to keep pointing south after taking many bends on a longer journey. It is doubtful that the chariot was actually used as a directional pointer for overland navigation. Perhaps it played a role in architecture in determining the orientation of buildings. It might just as well have been a means for the Chinese to show what they were technologically capable of.
A replica of a Chinese south-pointing chariot. The wheels propelled a gear mechanism that resulted in a pointer – often a figure – that kept pointing south even if the chariot took a turn.
Indeed, the differential existed long before the combustion engine appeared. Am I exaggerating when I say that even the promise of an off-road vehicle was already present in the common subconscious long before the invention of the automobile?
In fact, the combustion engine, which appeared only in the late 19th century, was in itself a specific application of another Chinese invention in combination with the proven mechanics of the steam engine: using the power of a controlled detonation to apply a sudden brutal force in a certain direction. The Chinese already invented gunpowder in the 9th century, and it was applied for the first time in Europe halfway through the 13th century.
Instead of using gunpowder to launch a bullet, the combustion engine uses a liquid fuel, whose ignition forces a cylinder to move. While the bullet isn’t intended to return, the cylinder does, because it’s connected to a rotating crankshaft. In a way – and with many centuries lying between both inventions – the combustion engine became sort of a recombination of a steam engine and a gun. It’s just one example of how inventions build further on what has been discovered before in different parts of the world, in different contexts and with different aims.
A landscape Marco Polo would have faced on his journey to the East. View on the Hindu Kush mountain range in the Wakhan valley at Yamchun castle.
Cultures often tend to claim radical mechanical, medical, societal and other achievements as their own. Taking a broader view may show that inventions are often the result of human culture as a whole instead of any isolated culture. Cultures borrow and build on each other’s ideas. Similar ideas even pop-up in different parts of the world, as genuine inventions independent of each other.
Whilst overlanding, one can focus on the specific elements of a local culture. How it differs from ours. However, it’s fascinating to see how these ‘surface ornamentations’ are based on aspects that are deeply shared throughout human culture as a whole. The former, precisely through their difference, express what we, as human culture, have in common.
Music is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Anywhere in the world, music is about organising sounds in a timed manner. But each culture favours or combines specific parameters like pitch, metre, rhythm, harmony, or just simply timbre and space differently. Listening to the music of unknown cultures is like recognizing similarity that has disguised itself as difference.
To summarise, traveling the Silk Road in a 4×4 with lockable differentials can be regarded as a tribute to the combined achievements of Eastern and Western cultures, or even human culture in general. It’s nothing more than an attitude to begin looking at it like that. Call it a silk attitude.