Le Livre de Marco Polo. [The Book of Marco Polo].

Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo's travels were first recorded in his Livre des merveilles du monde (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, c. 1300), a book that described to Europeans the wealth and great size of China, its capital Peking, and other Asian cities and countries. Centuries later, this rare edition was edited by French sinologist, philosopher and engineer Joseph Charignon, who reached China in 1898 to begin work on the Yunnan Railway and published work on it in Peking 1914. In 1910, he took Chinese nationality, adopted the name Sha Hai' Ang, and travelled extensively throughout China, with many of his observations from those travels finding their way into his extensively annotated work on Marco Polo, four years in the printing and many more for preparation. Following World War I he lived in Peking until his death in 1930. If some of his annotations are obscure or without references the overall work is nonetheless a remarkable piece of scholarship and very readable.