Jacob D'Ancona and the business of tourism and cultural exchange


In the 13th century an Italian Jewish merchant, Jacob D'Ancona, made an extensive tour of China for the purpose of trade. The record of his experiences, whether genuine or not is a matter of great dispute, has been translated and published, as The City of Light. Here is an excerpt from a review, published in the Sunday Telegraph, by a descendent of Jacob.

Seven hundred and twenty-six years ago, a learned Jewish merchant called Jacob set out from the Adriatic port of Ancona on a journey that would take him from Italy through Syria, the Persian Gulf and India. He reached China before Marco Polo, and like the Venetian who followed him, resolved to write an account of his travels. Some time after his return to Italy in 1273, Jacob wrote a magisterial memoir, more than 400 pages long, called The City of Light ...

[It] describes an epic adventure across the deserts and on the high seas. It is far better literature than the book that Polo wrote with his cellmate Rustichello of Pisa. Although Christopher Columbus read The Travels for inspiration, he might have learned more from The City of Light ...

Jacob's book is the intensely personal recollection of a scholar who also happened to be a wealthy merchant, a man who knew as much about the wisdom of the rabbinical sages as he did about the value of the velvet, wool, gold, wire, mercury, linen, soap, wind and corn which he took with him to
the Orient. At [the book's] heart is an unparalleled account of medieval Chinese society and manners seen through the eyes of a Western intellectual.

[For a contrasting view read this web review which gives some sense of the dispute over the text's authenticity.]

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I want to use this book as the basis for reflection on several aspects of tourism and cultural exchange. For the first Jacob 's journey presents an example of the grand tour. At every stop he was in the very position of a tourist with the need to find suitable accommodations, acceptable food, exchange money, and discover the resources of the city. To do this he was required to engage the services of agents or to call upon local connections related to his family or business for favors. Secondly, as he settled into each city the chasm of cultural difference, only beginning with language limitations, had implications for everything he did. Thirdly, since he was a scholar his cultural exchange, as opposed to his business dealings, focused on mutual education. He wanted to learn the habits of his hosts and they in turn, to a greater or lesser extent, wanted to acquire an understanding of his. What we might call seminars or debates were conducted with the objective of learning the strengths and virtues of each culture, if not to demonstrate the superiority of one over the other. And fourthly, of course this educational exchange was secondary, justified by the primary mercantile mission of the journey, the exchange of material goods. I suspect that if the journey had been made only for educational or cultural exchange that its purpose would not have been at all understood. This provides me with a clue for the real purpose of cultural/educational exchanges today: they are for the sake of economic exchange. I will return to this latter point in future entries. The final aspect has to do with the potential for and likely actual serious misunderstanding. Indeed even in the blurb cited above Jacob is called a Western intellectual but it is clear that by no stretch of the imagination could a Jewish merchant in his day really be the paradigm of a Western intellectual. The mention of Christopher Columbus alone makes that obvious! On the other side the portrayal of life in China tends toward being a pastiche of an imaginary realm of inscrutables. Yet generalizations however reductionist are the product of most or perhaps all cultural exchange.

In summary, this book poses 5 issues each deserving additional reflection:

1. Tourism creates dependency on the agency of local tour guides.
2. The existential impact of the sudden awareness of cultural difference or otherness.
3. Educational exchange creates the temptation to "prove" the superiority of one culture over the other.
4. The underlying economic justification for cultural/educational exchange.
5. The likelihood of serious misunderstanding due to reductionist interpretations of experiences.

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Posted: Sun - November 30, 2003 at 01:30 PM      

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