📍Kublai Khan Palace, Beijing, China
1275 – 1292“I spent seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan, and for much of that time I lived within his great palace in Khanbaliq — the city we now call Beijing. Nothing I had seen in Venice or along the Silk Road prepared me for the scale of it. The palace stood within a walled imperial city, within a walled outer city, the whole complex so large that it contained parks with white deer and exotic birds, artificial hills planted with evergreen trees, a great lake with marble bridges. I — a merchant's son from Venice — stood among the ambassadors of a dozen kingdoms as one of the Khan's trusted administrators.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Polo, M. The Travels of Marco Polo (1300, translated Latham 1958), Penguin Classics; Bergreen, L. Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu (2007), Knopf