Recreating and Revisiting History by tracing The Travels of Marco Polo and going back in time far away: A study of William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu : A Quest

Abstract

Travel and travel writing is undergoing great reformative transformation and the process has initiated much experimentation, trying to introduce novelty beyond the mystery hunts and the stereotypes. This includes the travel writer’s adoption of the route already taken by some senior traveller and following that specific account of the travel and recreating the same pact of travel in the modern times and trying to assess the authenticity of the given account. This scheme, beneficial to the traveller in many ways, also allows the traveller to dive deep and back into antiquity along with a well-constructed itinerary and much of the material of writing. This type of expedition may also be taken as the expedition of travelling to write, but they recreate  history as a natural byproduct of it. In Xanadu : A Quest is such recreation of history by William Dalrymple who travels from Jerusalem to the Chinese town Shang Tu, popularly known as Xanadu in the West carrying a phial of oil to the summer palace of Genghis Khan; the entire assignment and expedition once carried out by Marco  Polo and preserved in the book The Travels. This paper tries to look at Dalrymple’s expeditions as travel and comments on how in the process he enacts the entire history which presents a lively 
account of the historical journey, the places and milieu, then and now, and how the things have withstood the test of time.