"Marco Polo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and ceremonies would form an important and amusing piece of history. I have not Picart's Religious Ceremonies at hand, but if I mistake not he refers to many. In Marco Polo's Travels, I find the following singular, and to a Christian mind disgusting, custom. It is related in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... read aloud to them all the story of Kubla Khan and of Tamerlane, and of Marco Polo, the great traveler, and about the Mongols, the Buddhist missionaries, the Great Wall, the long periods of peace and temple building. They studied the maxims of Confucius and the accounts ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic visions marched across my mind at ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... celebrated travellers of the middle ages, was Marco Polo: he, his father, and uncle, after trading for some time in many of the commercial and opulent cities of Lesser Asia, reached the more eastern parts of that continent, as far as the court of the great khan, on the borders of China. For 26 years they were either engaged ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... A SEA ROUTE TO THE EAST. Men learned more about other strange lands through a Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, who wrote an account of his wonderful journey to the court of the Grand Khan, or Emperor of the Mongols, of his travels through China, and of his return to ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... Periplus, considers this as a copy of the map of Marco Polo, which was exhibited in the church of St Michael de Murano, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... Nympholeptoi, or those who had seen Pan. But far more awful and gloomy are the existing superstitions, throughout Asia and Africa, as to the perils of those who are phantom-haunted in the wilderness. The old Venetian traveller Marco Polo states them well: he speaks, indeed, of the Eastern or Tartar deserts; the steppes which stretch from European Russia to the footsteps of the Chinese throne; but exactly the same creed prevails amongst the Arabs, from Bagdad to Suez ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... islands, green and level, rising on all sides and seemingly numberless. To us they are the great green cluster of the Bahamas, but to Columbus, who fancied that he had reached the shores of Asia, they were that wonderful archipelago spoken of by Marco Polo, in which were seven thousand four hundred and fifty-eight islands, abounding with spices and rich in odoriferous trees ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... a Marco Polo or a William de Rubruquis, and we have no wonders to tell of the Great Mogul or the Great Cham. We did not sail for Messrs. Pride, Pomp, Circumstance, and Company; consequently, we have no great exploits to recount. We have been wrecked at sea only once in our many voyages, and, so far as we know ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... a Pony Express was not a new one in 1859. Marco Polo relates that Genghis Khan, ruler of Chinese Tartary had such a courier service about one thousand years ago. This ambitious monarch, it is said, had relay stations twenty-five miles apart, and his riders sometimes covered three hundred miles ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... lasting seven hours, in which Albuquerque himself was wounded. A well-armed fortress, to which the name of St. Michael was given, was then erected, as well as a Franciscan monastery, and the somewhat degraded Christians, who are described by Marco Polo as belonging to the Greek Church, were in great numbers baptized in the Catholic religion. On August 1, 1507, Tristao da Cunha, having completed the first task appointed to him, sailed away to {52} India to take in cargo, ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... with his own hand." [321] In this case it appears that if their hair was shorn the children could not come to the throne but would be destined to become monks. Similarly, in speaking of the Georgians, Marco Polo remarks that they cut their hair short like churchmen. [322] When a member of the religious order of the Manbhaos is initiated his head is shaved clean by the village barber, and the scalp-lock and moustache ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... apothecaries, labourers, ruffians, Moors and Jews. Moreover, seeing all that live on this earth were shown on the wheel, Satyrs and Cyclopes were there, and Pygmies and Centaurs such as Africa nurses in her burning deserts, and the men Marco Polo the traveller found, who are born without heads and with a face ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... however, excites their pity sufficiently to induce them to render help apart from a pecuniary reward of an exorbitant nature. Once within the city gates there is hope that you will soon find a shelter. You will have accomplished "the stage" which has been allotted from time immemorial. Marco Polo himself followed these stages in the year 1280 as we do to-day in the ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... of the sea, as a pastime, makes a tent of his boat if it rains, fighting the desperadoes of all climes with the superstition, for which he is indebted to their imagination for his safety in running phenomenal hazards, that he is a magician. Marco Polo was not so great a traveler or so rare an adventurer as Bigelow, and, having left Florida under a thunder cloud of the scowl of an angry army for untimely criticisms, he has invaded the celestial empire in his quaint canoe, and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... represented, from authentic documents, the danger and distress of Europe, (consult the word Tartari in his copious Index.) From motives of zeal and curiosity, the court of the great khan in the xiiith century was visited by two friars, John de Plano Carpini, and William Rubruquis, and by Marco Polo, a Venetian gentleman. The Latin relations of the two former are inserted in the 1st volume of Hackluyt; the Italian original or version of the third (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. Medii AEvi, tom. ii. p. 198, tom. v. p. 25) may be found in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the Jesuits first entered the Celestial Empire, they had collected every possible fact with regard to the customs of this immense country, which previous to their stay there had been known only through the extravagant tales of Marco Polo. Although China is the country of stagnation, and customs and fashion always remain much the same in it, the many events which had taken place made it desirable to obtain more exact particulars of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... "Ay be reading the books, laddie. An ill-educated man feels always at a disadvantage among folk of talent. Aboard ship you can read and think more than at a university. I've got a parcel for you to take when you go again. Hakluyt's Voyages and a good Marco Polo. And the new book of Mr. Dickens, 'The Haunted Man.' And there's a great new writer you'll not want to miss, by name of Thackeray." And there'd be the Bank of England note, "for fear you might be needing it on a special occasion, and not having it, and feeling bad." Dear Uncle Robin! ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... variations from Ramusio, except by supposing that this editor worked the whole piece over anew, correcting the errors of language upon his own authority. [Footnote: Mr. Greene adds in a note to this passage: "He did so also with the translation of Marco Polo. See Apostolo Zeno, Annot. alla Bib. Ital. del Fontanini, tom. II, p. 300; ed. di Parma. 1804." There is another instance mentioned by Amoretti in the preface to his translation of Pigafetta's journal of Magellan's ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... early history of Japanese industrial arts we know but little. We have no record of the kind of furniture which Marco Polo found when he travelled in Japan in the thirteenth century, and until the Jesuit missionaries obtained a footing in the sixteenth century and sent home specimens of native work, there was probably very little ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... Old Man of the Mountain is meant the head of the confraternity of hashish-eaters (Assassins), whose chief stronghold was at Alamut in Persia (1090-1256). Cf. Marco Polo, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... winter the Mongol princes come with their clansmen to revel in the delights of Cambalu, the city of the great Khan, as they have continued to call Peking ever since the days of Kublai, whose magnificence has been celebrated by Marco Polo. Their camping-ground is the Mongolian Square which is crowded with tabernacles built of bamboo and covered with felt. In a sort of bazaar may be seen pyramids of butter and cheese, two commodities that are abominations to the Chinese ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... spill royal blood seems to be only a particular case of a general unwillingness to shed blood or at least to allow it to fall on the ground. Marco Polo tells us that in his day persons caught in the streets of Cambaluc (Peking) at unseasonable hours were arrested, and if found guilty of a misdemeanor were beaten with a stick. "Under this punishment people sometimes die, but they adopt it in order to eschew bloodshed, for their Bacsis ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer |
