Kublai Khan later decides to figure out the true nature of the cities by inviting Marco Polo to describe cities using chess pieces, as he sees a chessboard and the game as structures that will give the cities more meaning. He also becomes more interested in Marco Polo as a person at about this same time, and so he asks to hear about Marco Polo’s hometown of Venice-though he’s confused when Marco Polo insists that whenever he speaks about a city, he’s speaking about Venice. Marco Polo shuts down all of these attempts, causing Kublai Khan to feel increasingly out of control and morose about the fate of his empire, which he comes to see as bloated, ill, and complacent.

As Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of cities that seem increasingly more fantastical and less likely to be real, Kublai Khan becomes more and more interested in coming up with ways to plan cities, figuring out which cities are real, and ascertaining if certain cities he describes might actually exist in the real world. He does this by seeking stories of his cities from travelers and merchants, especially the Venetian Marco Polo. The novel introduces Kublai Khan as a powerful leader, intent on learning about every city in his empire so that he may more fully control the empire. The real-life Kublai Khan was the 13th-century emperor of the Mongol Empire who also crowned himself the first emperor of the Chinese Yuan dynasty.

Marco polo invisible cities