If we are to believe the Enlightenment philosophers, Confucian China compared favorably to the European nations, which were divided by religious discord and political conflict. Therefore it could serve as the location of an alluring utopia, which because of its inaccessibility remained very much a product of the imagination. If I call this utopian interest in China a mode of Orientalism, I use the term in a neutral sense, differently from Edward Said (1978) whose references to Orientalism nearly always imply a pejorative judgment. (The use of the term Orientalism is more elaborately discussed in chapter 12.) The image of China in the years of the early Enlightenment was predominantly shaped by the enthusiastic reports from Jesuit missionaries active in the Middle Kingdom, and not by the earlier account of Marco Polo, which played almost no role in the debate of the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century sinophiles. Yet the idea of a splendid Chinese civilization had already been fostered by the Venetian merchant and remained influential up to the present day.

Is Marco Polo’s China a utopia? Calvino’s answer

Marco Polo’s Description of the World (Divisament dou monde), which survived in various manuscripts from the early fourteenth century and in its printed versions usually is referred to as The Travels of Marco Polo, is an account of an amazingly adventurous journey of Marco, his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo from Venice through the Middle East to Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, and Khanbalik, present-day Beijing, the residence of Kublai Khan, founder of the Mongol or Yuan dynasty and from 1280 emperor of China. From Khanbalik Marco Polo traveled widely in China, going to regions which nowadays are known as Sichuan and Yunnan as well as to the coastal provinces, to return after many years with his father and uncle by sea via Sumatra, Ceylon, India, and Aden to Venice, where they arrived in 1295.

Like his father and uncle, Marco Polo had a commercial interest in visiting China and neighboring countries. He provides detailed information about the geographical and climatological conditions, military operations, livestock and other means of subsistence, ways of transportation, crime, and punishment.