Conclusions and Future Directions
Conclusions and Future Directions
The final chapter addresses the key questions raised by these cartographic materials. Do these maps and texts connect back to the famed tradition of Marco Polo and his narrative? Are they later copies of earlier works that are genuinely connected to the family of Marco Polo? This chapter offers some conjectures, but also highlights some very intriguing clues, most notably how a number of these maps relate to a Chinese narrative that was not known in the West until the eighteenth century. Finally, the book introduces the reader to Giacinto Placido Zurla, a learned Cardinal Vicar of Rome, born in 1769 who wrote about Polo’s voyages—and who implied that Marco Polo somehow had knowledge of the remote regions beyond the Bering Strait. The concluding chapter also acknowledges the wonderful possibilities for future research on these materials.
Keywords: forgery, fabrication, Hui Shen, Fusang, Ptolemy, Giacinto Placido Zurla, Bering Strait
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