THE CITY OF LIGHT. The Hidden Journal Of The Man Who Entered China Four Years Before Marco Polo. With "Remarks on The City of Light," by Wang Lianmao

brown & dark brown hardbound 8vo. 8º (octavo).dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. looks new. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of all markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. not worn or torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking , underlining, remainder markings etc ~first american edition (with a new preface). first printing so stated ( & # 1 in # line). xvii+538p. b&w double page map. 16 pages of illustrations. glossary. jewish calendar of months. names. jacob’s language. notes 7 references. index. medieval history. history of china. travel & exploration. maritime history. history of india. history of arabia. history of southeast asia. ~ Before Marco Polo, A Jewish~Italian Merchant Embarked On A Perilous Voyage To The East. His Destination A Chinese Metropolis Called The City Of Light. ~ THIS VIVID AND RACY account of life and behavior, public and private, high and very low, in a teeming Chinese mercantile city of the thirteenth century is one of the world's great tales of travel and adventure. In 1270 a scholarly Jewish merchant called Jacob d'Ancona set out on a voyage from Italy. A year later, he arrived in China at the coastal metropolis of Zaitun, the "City of Light" (now known as Quanzhou), four years before Marco Polo arrived at Xanadu in 1275. Nothing was known of this epochal journey until 1990, when David Selbourne was shown Jacob's account of his travels, a remarkable manuscript that had been hidden from public view for more than seven centuries. When Selbourne's translation was published in Great Britain in 1997, it was greeted with furious controversy. Bitterly attacked by a handful of U.S. and British scholars as a "fake" and a "hoax," it was acclaimed by the Times of London as a "grand book" and by the Sunday Telegraph as an "unparalleled account of medieval Chinese society and manners seen through the eyes of a Western intellectual." As a result of the attacks, the planned simultaneous United States publication was canceled. Leading Sung dynasty experts in China now believe the journal to be authentic, with numerous scholars verifying its content. Wang Lianmao, a much~respected Chinese academic, contributes authenticating commentary to this edition. Valuable new information has recently surfaced from Quanzhou, confirming both the presence of Jews in the medieval Chinese city and many of the details of Jacob's text. An authoritative Chinese edition was published in late 1999. David Selbourne was the first to discover and translate The City of Light into English, at the request of the manuscript's Italian owner, who has so far refused to disclose his possession of it to others or permit it to be examined. …