The Marco Polo Drive

Reimagining the Silk Road in an Age of Technology and Peace

Gaochang District, Turpan, Xinjiang, China. Photo credit: Christoph Theisinger

Seven hundred fifty years ago, a Venetian 17-year-old set off east and didn’t come home for a quarter of a century. Marco Polo left the Venetian lagoon in 1271 with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo—three merchants on horseback bound, eventually, for the court of Kublai Khan. Their expedition ran on one horsepower per traveler.

Our troupe of four—my wife Sonia, our friend Patrick Zhong, his son Jimmy, and me—has just set out along that same road east, where West meets East along the ancient Silk Route. I won’t pretend we’re roughing it the way young Marco did. Our caravan is an all-electric BYD Denza, and the top models in that line reach an astonishing 1,582 horsepower in one quiet and smooth ride.

But strip away the horsepower and the seven and a half centuries, and the journey is the same: curiosity pointed firmly eastward, a belief that the surest road to peace runs through human encounters, and a long line of strangers who turn into new friends around the second cup of tea.

We call it the Marco Polo Drive of Peace, Culture, and Sustainable Development—12 countries, 15,000 kilometers, 43 days, from Rome to Hong Kong. We began, fittingly, in the Eternal City, home of the Papacy, because like the Polos before us, we are carrying a message from the Pope eastward, in our case Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a plea for peace and for the wise and humane use of our powerful new technologies. The Polos once ferried messages between Pope Gregory X and Kublai Khan across a divided world. The aim, it turns out, has not changed all that much over 750 years.

From Rome we pointed the car north, and in Bologna we stopped to charge—and here the twenty-first century announced itself with a flourish. Using BYD’s “flash charge” and its remarkable Blade batteries, we charged to 97.5 percent in under nine minutes, before our espresso arrived. Marco Polo measured his progress in seasons and mountain passes; we measure ours in minutes at the charger, and in the remarkable ease of crossing Eurasia without burning a drop of oil. This, in short, is a main message of the trip: that the green technologies now arriving can serve humanity, knit us closer together, and lighten our environmental footprint all at once.

As I write, we are rolling toward Venice—the Polos' own hometown, the city from which their journey began and to which, a quarter century later, they returned. From there our route turns to Croatia and Serbia, Bulgaria and Türkiye, across the Caucasus into Georgia and Azerbaijan, over the Caspian into Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, names that still host travels across the steppes—and then finally into China, to Xi’an and Shanghai and Shenzhen, ending in Hong Kong in late July.

Several governments have prepared a warm welcome for us, and we look forward to sitting with political, business and cultural leaders along the way—and, just as eagerly, with students, drivers, shopkeepers, and the young people who are inheriting this interconnected world. Our firm desire is not only to talk but to listen.

For those who’d like to come along, I’ll be teaching an online course as we drive—a moving classroom on the history of the Silk Road, on sustainable development, and on the old, stubborn, necessary idea that nations are far better off cooperating than colliding. You can sign up through the SDG Academy; the road is open to anyone with a curious mind. The sign-up page is here.

I return to one core belief as the kilometers tick by. Many so-called geopolitical strategists and politicians argue that the civilizations of East and West are fated to clash rather than cooperate. Marco Polo knew better. At the far end of the longest road to the East, he found not enemies but a brilliant, sophisticated civilization eager to trade ideas as readily as goods. The Silk Road has never been a single thread, much less a wall. The Silk Road from ancient times has been a vast network of interconnection. Globalization is a mark of civilization, from ancient times to our own era. Let us work for a globalization of peace, the harmony of diverse cultures, and sustainable development for all of today’s young people, the Marco and Maria Polo’s of the twenty-first century.

Our Denza hums where the Polos' horses once plodded. The encyclical we carry has a new title, but the message is the same: if we meet face to face, peace stops being an abstraction or formula, and becomes a daily reality and joy.