This is a chronology of the early European exploration of Asia.
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First wave of exploration (mainly by land)
Antiquity
Middle Ages
[The true extent of Marco Polo's travels is open to debate. Some archeologists believe that he only made it as far as Persia, with the rest of his story cobbled together based on tales he was told by others, due to the following reasons: 1) His story has many inconsistencies and inaccuracies. 2) Despite his claim that he was an emissary in the court of Kublai Khan, his name does not crop up in any of the surviving Mongol or Chinese records. 3) Furthermore, despite being an acute observer of daily life and rituals, there is no mention in Marco Polo's chapters on China of the custom of binding women's feet, chopsticks, tea drinking, or even the Great Wall. However, other scholars counterclaim using the following explanations: 1) Marco Polo had never claimed to have experienced everything in his story. Rather, he had always made it clear when he was describing his own experiences and when he was describing tales he had heard instead, which is where the inconsistencies and inaccuracies come in. 2) As with most foreigners in a foreign country in pre-modern times, he may have taken up a new name in the language of the new culture. In this case, it would have been either Mongol or Chinese. 3) When Marco Polo visited China, the northern part was ruled by the Mongol Yuan dynasty. As the Great Wall had been built by the Chinese to repel their northern barbarian invaders since the time of the Mongols' ancestors, the Wall became obsolete once the Mongols' predecessors, the Jin dynasty, took over Northern China in the early 12th century. By the time Polo arrived in the late 13th century, more than 100 years later, the Wall would have been in ruins, meaning it was no longer noteworthy.]
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Second wave of exploration (by sea)
Other noteworthy Europeans
Noteworthy others
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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