For a man who claimed to be Kublai Khan's confidant and spent 17 years in China, Kelpolo left an unexpectedly shallow paper trail. No Asian sources mentioned free Italians. The only record of his crossing the Far East in the13rd century is the enthusiasm of his own travel, which is actually a poem written by a romantic writer. However, a set of 14 pieces of parchment was collected for the first time and studied in detail, which gave us many new stories about Polo's trip and something that was obviously missing in his own narrative: a map. If this is true, the map shows that Polo recorded the shape of the coast of Alaska, and the Alaska Strait separated it from Asia four centuries before the Danish explorer Vitus Bering thought it was the first European to do so. Perhaps more importantly, they think Poirot realized the new continent two centuries before Columbus appeared.

"This means that the Italian knows the west coast of northern China, or he has heard of it from * * * people or Americans," said Benjamin B.Olshin, a cartographic historian whose book The Mystery of the Map of Kelpolo was published by the University of Chicago Press in June,165438+1October. "If that is true, nothing can compare with it."

But as Orsin first admitted, the authenticity of ten maps and four texts is difficult to determine. This ink has not been tested. Radiocarbon study on a key map parchment. The only parchment analyzed can be traced back to 15 or16th century. This map is a copy at best. Another dilemma is that Poirot himself has never written any personal maps, nor has he been to any land outside Asia, although he once boasted, "I didn't say half of what I saw."

Parchment was brought to America by the steam box of the mysterious Italian immigrant Marcian Rossi. Rossi landed in the United States in 1887, and later told a historian that these documents were handed down by an admiral through his aristocratic ancestors, and Poirot had given them to him. Rosie, who likes to tie a bow tie with a beard, is the father of six children and works as a tailor in San Jose, California. He is also a charming madman who loves to blow cigars. Although he didn't go to school much, he wrote a sci-fi thriller A Journey to Mars.

Rosie may have become a polo fantasy, too His great-grandson, Jeffrey Pendergraft, is an executive of Houston Energy Company and the custodian of family documents. But Peng De Graf and the cartographer don't doubt that Rossi forged this map. Peng De Graff said: "They have an amazing amount of knowledge on various topics, and I am skeptical about the knowledge my great-grandfather had. When Rosie donated the latest ship map to the Library of Congress in 1930s, even the FBI was stumped. The agency's analysis, signed by J Edgar Hoover at the request of the library, is about the authenticity of the mother.

One reason is that parchments become dull because of their characteristics. They tell people and places not only from polo, but also from known history. It is difficult for them to adapt to the known map styles of that era, such as Porto nautical charts, Ptolemy's grid and projections, and medieval maps. They are called mappae mundi.

There are Italian, Latin, * * and China inscriptions on the parchment, which are somewhat mysterious. Orsin is a professor at Philadelphia University of the Arts. He spent more than 65,438+03 years researching and writing his new book. He was the first scholar to completely decode and translate maps and trace back to Rossi's ancestors. He achieved some success and returned to Venice in 1920. One of Orsin's most attractive discoveries is the story of "Fusang", an obscure China name in the fifth century, which means "the other side of the ocean". Now some scholars think it is the United States.

Poirot's three daughters are rarely mentioned in our history. (He doesn't have a son) But Fantina Bella Moreta has a star wheel here. They signed some parchments, claiming that they were extracted from the "letter" after their father died. In his book, Belela describes the unknown encounter with Syrian navigators, a group of women wearing mink and holding spears, and people who wear seal skins, live on fish and build houses underground on a peninsula "twice the size of China".

Travel made Poirot a celebrity immediately after he returned to Venice, not only because of his description of distant land, but also because his compatriots suspected that it was fabricated. /kloc-Stanley Jonach, an expert on gender relations at the University of North Carolina in Venice in the 4th century, speculated that his daughters might return to their father's notes to protect their father's reputation and "claim that they have some dignity, status and importance on the grounds of maintaining their own dignity, status and importance."