![]() It is over this terrain that the Karakoram Highway runs, a 795-mile triumph of engineering that was built over a period of 18 years before 1978 by army road crews from China and Pakistan. But it is certain that his path, by horse and camel, led over the towering mountain passes, some more than 16,000 feet, that admit to China from what is now its western frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was during his confinement in a Genoese prison that Polo dictated his account of his travels to a cellmate, Maestro Rusticello, a fact that has made the adventurer's precise route from Venice to Khanbalik, the modern Peking, a matter of scholarly dispute. With the opening on May 1 of the Karakoram Highway, Peking licensed any foreigner to relive one of the most daunting experiences of Marco Polo, the most fabled China traveler of them all. Most of the regions newly accessible to foreigners are in the Chinese heartland, but one of them has made possible a journey to an area remote even by the standards of those who explored the country before 1949. One has only to read the accounts of Somerset Maugham, who visited here in 1921, or of Peter Fleming, who was here in 1935, to know the beguiling possibilities of a China where travel was less hindered.Īs the Government has extended its list of ''open'' areas, this chagrin has eased. ![]() ![]() But for us there is a company of foreigners still more to be envied, those who journeyed here before the Communists closed the outlying reaches of the country to the world. Westerners who live in China are accustomed to being told how fortunate we are. ![]()
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