National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - The Silk Road (2000) Movie Script
The Silk Road
In the West stood a continent built
on lofty ideals and grand ambition.
In the East, towered an empire of
unimaginable size and splendor.
For thousands of years
these two civilizations had thrived
in seeming isolation.
Two men stepped into the void.
Marco Polo was lured by the promise
of unprecedented wealth.
Sven Hedin by a thirst for adventure
and the trappings of world fame.
Confronted by the most
daunting terrain on earth,
they went in search of the impossible
a lasting connection
between East and West
Along the old Silk Road.
Italy, 1296 A.D.
A Venetian trader languishes in jail
and wonders if he will ever get out.
His name is Marco Polo
and he's now a prisoner of war
the victim of an ongoing conflict
between Genoa and his native Venice.
Polo is afraid he will die here
in jail
and he's come up with
an amazing strategy for survival.
A book about his life and his travels.
An incredible story that might allow
his name to live on forever.
"There has been no man,
Christian or pagan,
Mongol or Indian,
or of any race whatsoever,
who has known or explored
so much of the world
and its great wonders as have I,
Marco Polo."
He writes about his incredible trek
across lethal mountains and deserts...
to Cathay, modern day China: a magical
country at the end of the earth.
A land so wealthy that its ruler could
entertain 40,000 guests at a time.
A civilization so advanced they could
predict the movement of the heavens.
A culture so generous that husbands
even shared their wives with strangers.
Marco Polo's book was a success.
His journey to Cathay
has become one of the most famous
adventure stories ever written.
But it is full of such incredible
tales of discovery
and intrigue that it leaves everyone
wondering the same thing:
Could it possibly be true?
Or is Polo's adventure
along the old Silk Road
actually a masterpiece
of the imagination?
In the first century B.C.,
imperial Rome dominated the west,
Han China the east.
A world apart, these two superpowers
knew little of each other's existence.
The seductive beauty of
one substance drew them closer.
It all began in Mesopotamia. 53 B.C.
Roman legions were on the brink of
a historic victory
against the Parthian army.
Unexpectedly,
the Parthians unfurled huge banners
of a magical translucent material.
The Roman army had never seen anything
like it, and fled in confusion
leaving 20,000 dead
on the battlefield.
Fear turned to fascination
and silk quickly became
the rage in ancient Rome.
The Chinese fabric was soon
worth its weight in gold.
Traders saw their chance.
Caravans braved the 5000 miles
separating China and Rome.
Cities sprung up in the deserts
and plains to service the traders.
Along with the goods flowed ideas
that revolutionized
the cultures along the way.
Buddhism and Islam spread eastwards.
Printing and papermaking went West.
The Silk Road pioneering connection
between East and West was established.
People have a mental vision
that the Silk Road is like I95,
a huge long highway
and that one person took some silk
from one end all the way to the other.
And in fact
that almost never happened.
Merchants would take the goods
from one oasis to another
and then another group of merchants
would take them on.
So I think the Silk Road
is not the road.
I think the most important things are
those communities along the Silk Road.
For nearly a thousand years
these communities thrived.
In the 10th century,
China collapsed in civil war,
and it was no longer safe
to travel in the East.
In the chaos,
the Silk Road fell silent.
The desert cities that depended on
its traffic were abandoned.
As shifting sands buried their memory,
the link between
East and West was broken.
a young boy named Marco Polo
was born in Venice, Italy.
Marco grew up a forgotten orphan
on the docks and canals of the city.
Marco Polo did not have a conventional
and happy childhood.
His father left before he was born
and his mother died
when he was relatively young.
But actually that
relatively unhappy childhood
provided him with certain skills
that would turn out to be
very important for him on his travels.
He learned to get along with
a wide variety of peoples.
One day Marco's world was turned
upside down.
A stranger walked into his life.
It was his father.
It was the first time
the two had ever met.
And the boy listened in awe as his
father explained his 14 year absence.
He said he had made
an incredible overland journey
to a magical land in the East.
He talked about a foreign people
the Mongols
and their massive empire,
the biggest the world had ever seen.
And explained how he had just
risked his life
to personally visit its capital
in Cathay, modern day China.
Young Marco was stunned.
China, in the 13th Century
to a Venetian,
is probably the most foreign place
that there is,
maybe like the South Pole
is to us today.
That you can go
but it's a huge journey.
Not many people go.
There are incredible
logistical difficulties.
Marco's father also claimed
to have risen to favor with
Kublai Khan, the new Mongol king.
He insisted he was sitting
on a gold mine.
For with the Khan's favor,
he would have prime access to
all the treasures of the East.
If the Polos could make it
to China and back again,
they'd be able to reestablish
overland trade links
between two very
wealthy civilizations.
The sudden reappearance of his father
must have stimulated him
to think about perhaps joining him
on a travel of his own.
Going to China for Marco Polo
would be the most extraordinary
adventure of his entire life.
They probably don't suspect they're
going to get all the way to China.
But I think there's enough talk
at the time about modern,
what's now Turkey or what's now Iran
that he would have been very excited.
Marco imagined his journey
to the east
the wealth of Cathay,
the dangers ahead.
Some would say that an imaginary
journey is all that he ever took.
According to his story, Marco Polo
set off for China in 1271 A.D.
a merchant in search of
the world's wealthiest market.
His 5000 mile overland journey took
him through Tabriz, Baghdad, Hormuz
the great bazaars of the Middle East
where the trading energy of
the old Silk Road is still alive.
Marco was encouraged by what he saw.
"Traveling merchants
can make very good money.
For there is much gold and silk
cloth of great value."
Camping out in the open at night,
Marco was careful to protect his profits.
Anybody who traveled on the Silk Roads
had to be really quite
brave and courageous.
Many people just didn't make it,
in part because of banditry
all along the route.
One night in Persia,
Polo claims to have been robbed.
Many of his caravan were killed.
Marco was lucky to get away
with his life.
It's not as simple as taking a plane
in Venice and hopping over to Beijing.
This was a long, long
and demanding journey.
After a grueling trek through
modern day Iran and Afghanistan,
Polo describes his confrontation
with the Pamirs,
the infamous mountain range
that separates East and West.
altitude and frostbite were
the least of Polo's problems.
"There are innumerable wolves
and the bones of their kill
are stacked by the roadside
to serve as landmarks to travelers
in the bleak winter."
Polo sought refuge in local villages.
"I give you my word that
if a stranger comes to a house here
to seek hospitality
he receives a very warm welcome.
The host bids his wife do everything
that the guest wishes.
The women are beautiful,
vivacious and always ready to please."
Marco Polo's description of
these enticing beauties of the East,
of their being so subservient fits in
with a pattern that has continued
throughout the ages of eastern women
having some sort of exotic
and erotic appeal.
There's an attempt to make the east
more exotic than it really is.
According to his story,
Polo now entered the Taklamakan desert
the most forbidding obstacle
along the old Silk Road.
With 1000 foot high dunes
and swirling sandstorms,
the Taklamakan is 600 miles of hell.
The Chinese call it
the desert of death.
The temperature of the desert is formidable.
In the summer, the temperature
can reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
There's no water, in the desert.
There's no wells.
So you're walking through
a sea of sand
and it's very difficult to think that
you might come out the other end.
It is here that Polo and his story
walk into a heated controversy.
Did Polo really make it
across the Taklamakan into China?
Or is the story of his arrival
in the East a complete fabrication?
Marco Polo has a format
when he travels.
He goes from city to city.
He tells you where he is
and he tells you how far it is
from one point to the next.
When he goes to visit the Mongol
capital he departs from that format.
He no longer tells you
the cities in between
where he is in north China
and what's at the Mongol capital.
So the effect when you're reading it
is very abrupt.
Did he go, how did he go,
what cities are in between?
And the only conclusion
I can draw is he didn't go,
that somebody told him about it
and he just adds it in.
This was a custom of travel writing
during that time.
You'd hear something and you'd claim
that you actually had been
and had actually witnessed the events
that somebody else told you about.
This has been taken by some scholars
to mean that he probably didn't travel
all the way to China.
That is taking things
a little too far.
Marco Polo wrote about his travels
while he was in prison.
That obviously is going to affect
the way he presents his information.
He's at a difficult time in his life
and he wants to attract an audience
so he's going to emphasize
the strangest and the most interesting
rather than the ordinary elements
of his travels.
From his squalid cell in Italy,
Marco wrote about the luxurious court
of Kublai Khan, the Mongol king,
which he supposedly reached in 1275.
He told how in Shengdu,
the city later immortalized as Xanadu,
the trials of his 4 year journey
suddenly seemed worthwhile.
"The Khan's palace is the largest
in the world.
The roof is ablaze with every color
it glitters like crystals and sparkles
from afar.
The hall is so vast that
it could seat 6000 for one banquet."
The descriptions that Marco Polo
provides for us,
descriptions of Xanadu for example,
the summer palace of Kublai Khan
dovetail with what we know of
the archeology of that city.
The city was excavated
in the 1930s by the Japanese
and they found that the placement of
the buildings
and the style of the buildings
was exactly the way Marco Polo
had described them.
The Venetian trader
was equally impressed, it seems,
by the mighty Yangtze river.
"It is the greatest river
in the world.
More boats loaded with more dear
things and of greater value come and go
by this river than by all the rivers
and seas used by the Christians."
Marco could not have asked for more.
He had made it safely to China.
He had discovered a land of
unimaginable wealth.
His quest to establish a lucrative
trade connection with the east
was very much on course.
It is here,
on the threshold of his dream,
that Marco's account
turns fantastical.
He says that he sees a fish that's a
hundred feet long that has fur on it.
He describes how the animals bow
to visitors at the Khan's court.
Like the tigers came out
and they take a bow on cue.
So you know it's just things that
when you read it cannot have happened.
The bizarre sections in Marco Polo
of animal headed people
and strange looking fish,
this is something that is not unusual.
The conventions of travel writing
during that time fit in with
the kind of mythologizing and
fantasizing that Marco Polo includes.
Equally controversial is
the total absence of any reference
to unique Chinese rituals
that would have amazed a European
seeing them for the first time.
Marco Polo does not mention certain
characteristics of China
such as calligraphy, tea, bound feet
because Marco Polo lived
among the Mongols.
He dealt with Kublai Khan and the
other members of the Mongol nobility.
He didn't deal with the Chinese.
So just because he didn't mention
those things
doesn't mean that
he didn't reach China.
Marco Polo's defenders
point to details
which could not have been
invented in Europe.
"Throughout the province of Cathay
there are large black stones
dug from the mountains which burn
and make flames like logs."
Marco Polo was the first European
to ever write about coal
a treasure that transformed the world.
Marco Polo was definitely in China.
I am absolutely convinced of it because
of the tremendous detail in his book
his descriptions of the Mongols:
Mongol customs, Mongol dress,
Mongol attitudes towards women.
And in addition he describes
specific events so clearly.
The assassination of
a finance minister.
Now who would have known about that
if you hadn't been in China?
The reason I don't think Marco Polo
went to China is that
there are basic factual inaccuracies
in the book.
He says he's the governor of a town
and we have a list of governors
of that town, Yangzhou,
and he's not on the list.
And the second is he says he's
at a battle that took place in 1273
and we know the battle took place in
Perhaps the secret to the mystery of
Polo's account
lies in his prison cell in Italy.
Marco did not write the book himself.
He dictated it,
during his year in jail,
to his cellmate, Rustichello
who happened to be a writer
with a passion for fairytales.
Rustichello was a man
whose renowned for writing romances
and not actual descriptions of events.
And so obviously the fact that
Rustichello rather than Marco Polo
set down the work may have added some
of these legendary
and mythical qualities to the work
that Marco Polo had not intended.
The only verifiable piece of evidence
from Polo's life
his will reveals that
he died a wealthy man.
Yet his nickname"Il Milione"
the big one
mockingly referred to the size of
his imagination, not his bank balance.
Marco was defiant till the end.
When asked by his friends
on his deathbed in 1324
whether he had really been
to China, Marco replied:
"I have only told you half of
what I saw."
Marco Polo died
surrounded by doubters,
yet his influence on the history
of exploration is undisputed.
His controversial book became the
bible for a new generation of explorers.
The inspiration for
Christopher Columbus'
historic discovery
of the new world.
The greatest impact Marco Polo has
on later explorers is planting the idea
that you can go to exotic places
and write about them and become famous.
When you think about it nobody
before him is famous as an explorer.
So he becomes the first famous
explorer, adventurer.
Whether Marco Polo did make it China
or not, one thing is certain.
His dream of pioneering
a trade connection
between East and West
was never realized.
China again dissolved into civil war,
making travel in the East impossible.
The tantalizing promise of
the Silk Road
once again faded into the past
craving fulfillment in another age.
set out in Marco Polo's footsteps.
Unlike Polo, Sven Hedin was not
in search of wealth.
He was after something
far more elusive and dangerous.
Stockholm, Sweden. 1949.
Sven Hedin, the 84 year old explorer,
prepares a memoir of his life.
In his prime he heroically explored
the earth's final frontier.
He discovered lost cities
of the Silk Road,
bringing to life
a forgotten civilization.
Hedin, the ambitious adventurer,
had won the adulation of the world.
He was the Neil Armstrong of his day.
You know, Inner Asia was the moon.
And he went.
He was very famous,
a rock star at the time.
But his passion for the spotlight
led to a very dangerous liaison.
After the war, Sven Hedin was
obliterated from the memory of Europe.
He was a persona non grata.
Nobody wanted to touch him
after the second world war.
Sven Hedin was really a person
who you couldn't associate with.
In his memoir, Sven Hedin has
one last chance to redeem himself.
Would he exorcise the demons
of his past?
Or would he die a forgotten man?
April 24th, 1880.
his childhood hero returns triumphant.
Stockholm harbor is a riot of
pride and excitement.
Adolf Nordenskiold,
the Swedish explorer, has come home
the first person to sail around
Russia back to Europe.
Together with his family
he had climbed the mountains
overlooking the harbor of Stockholm,
from where he and thousands
and thousands of Stockholm people
watched the return of the ship.
A great national hero was created
and Sven Hedin really wanted
to step into his footsteps.
This dream of fame and adventure
would drive Hedin all his life.
It was in Berlin,
as a geography student
that Hedin developed his lifelong
obsession with central Asia.
At the turn of the 20th century,
Central Asia was one of
the last unexplored frontiers on earth.
the distant prize of aspiring
explorers and world statesmen alike.
For it was the center of
a brooding cold war:
a race between Britain,
Russia and China
to expand their empires in the region.
With the eyes of the world focused on
this remote land,
it was the perfect stage
for the ambitious Hedin
to make his name as an explorer.
At its heart, was a massive sea
of sand known as the Taklamakan.
When Hedin decided on becoming
an explorer, he wanted deserts.
Explorers should climb
dangerous mountains
and they should cross
dangerous deserts.
That's what an explorer should do.
So he found this Taklamakan
which according to him,
no one ever had crossed,
in living memory at least.
He wanted to be the first,
to walk on paths
where no man ever walked before.
Hedin was sure that beneath
the Taklamakan's shifting sand
lay ancient cities of
the old Silk Road
which had been lost to the world
for over a thousand years.
If only he could discover
the lost cities of the Silk Road,
Hedin believed his path to fame
would be secure.
In 1893, Hedin obtained funding
from the king of Sweden
to explore the uncharted extremes
of central Asia.
But his imminent departure
was bittersweet.
Hedin was leaving behind the woman
of his dreams.
Mille Bruman was beautiful
and very wealthy.
Like Hedin, she was a romantic.
He adored her.
"She was magnificent in her youth,
innocence and beauty.
She was blonde and had eyes of
the most beautiful color."
In Sven's mind, there was no doubt
they would marry when he got back.
Kashi, modern day China.
Once known as Kashgar, a key market
town along the old Silk Road.
Sven Hedin arrived here in 1894,
after a grueling year long journey.
Kashi was the obvious base
for Hedin's expedition
for it stood on the edge
of the Taklamakan
the desert Hedin had come to explore.
With thousand foot sand dunes
and 130 degree summer heat,
the desert is one of the most
forbidding places on earth.
Hedin began to make
careful preparations
for an expedition into the desert,
when devastating news arrived.
When he was sitting there
waiting for his camels there
came a letter from home
where somebody wrote that his love,
Mille Maria Bruman, was going to
get engaged with someone else.
And his whole world shattered.
And he writes about his desperation
that now nothing was worth anything.
He would do this absolutely
crazy thing.
He would just venture into the desert
and see what would come out of it.
Hedin was heartbroken.
Distraught and totally ill equipped,
he set off on a suicidal quest
to find a lost city in the desert.
He walked through the streets
and the people formed lines
and they cheered him and they cried
and they said you will go
to the desert of death
and you will never come out alive.
And he walked through the streets
with his laden camels
and people said his camels
are too heavy.
They'll not make it, he'll not
come back from the desert of death.
They walked out to the edge of
the desert and disappeared.
"One thousand heavy steps
towards the goal.
Not one backwards was my motto."
Stubborn and defiant,
Hedin had started a deathmarch.
Hedin realized his guides
had not brought enough water.
The expedition was now in the middle
of the deadliest desert on earth
with only two days of water left.
Should they turn back?
Or look for an oasis?
Hedin, as ever, chose to push on.
Straight into the Karaburan
an infamous storm that whips the sand
into a punishing frenzy.
His expedition was now lost
in the dreaded Taklamakan.
The name 'Taklamakan'
from the Uighur translates is
"you go in but you do not come out."
By 9 o'clock in the morning
having spent 2 and a half hours
loading your camels to get ready
for the day's march,
you could have drunk the water
by then,
let alone keep it and have
precious sips throughout the day,
to try and cover a pitiful
maybe five miles at most.
Because the nature
of the sand dunes is such
you can't go in a straight line
or very fast.
Then the sand just gets into
every part of your body
your nose, your eyes,
your ears just become blocked with it.
And your lips were split.
Your tongue was swollen and sticking
to the roof of your mouth.
Over the course of the next 5 days,
died from dehydration,
and one collapsed with exhaustion.
Finally Hedin and a local guide,
stumbled across footsteps
which they prayed would lead to water.
"Why should I die,
in the embraces of this deceitful
desert, for an unfaithful girl?
I will conquer the desert
and return home a hero
and all my people will see it
as a manly and courageous deed."
But the footsteps were their own.
They had walked in a circle.
The guide gave up, leaving Hedin alone
to crawl to a parched death.
He struggled on.
After 6 days without water,
Hedin finally found the Khotan river.
Luck and unbelievable perseverance
had saved him.
His whole life was characterized by
this will to achieve to prove himself,
to prove that he was not a failure.
The failure that he had become
when she turned him down.
Six months after his first disaster,
Hedin was back in the Taklamakan.
More determined than ever
to find the footsteps to fame.
One night, a local brought Hedin
some woodcarvings he had found
in the desert.
Mysterious objects which might lead
him to the lost civilization
buried beneath the sand.
"In spite of my misfortunes
the previous spring,
I was again drawn irresistibly
toward the mysterious country
under the eternal sand."
This expedition was different.
The water bottles were full,
the winter air cooler.
After a 5 day trek
into the Taklamakan,
Hedin finally came across
signs of an abandoned city.
He stopped and looked for
confirmation.
The evidence was undeniable.
He had found Dandanuilik,
a lost city of the Silk Road.
"No explorer had an inkling,
up till now,
of the existence of this ancient city.
Here I stand, like the prince
in the enchanted wood,
having wakened to new life a city
which has slumbered for
a thousand years."
Hedin's discovery was just
a beginning.
It started one of the greatest
archeological races of the 20th century.
Hedin's main contribution
to the Silk Road is that
he starts the race to discover
all the Silk Road sites.
He is never the person who figures out
the historical significance
of any given site.
But, he's the person
who gets other people to go
and figure those things out.
Using Hedin's pioneering maps,
famous archeologists
like Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot
raced desperately to find other
lost cities of the Silk Road.
For these Europeans, it was much
more than a race for buried treasure.
It was a battle to appropriate
the history of an area
they hoped to control in the future.
The Silk Road, a forgotten ideal,
was once again a global concern.
Despite his success,
Hedin was still infatuated with Mille.
The proud Swede wrote her a letter,
wishing her happiness
with her future husband.
She was at that time
on vacation in Norway
and she had decided to
break up the engagement
because the one she really loved
was Sven Hedin.
So she wrote this letter to
Sven Hedin.
She went to the post office
to drop it in the post box
and the postman says oh here's
a letter for you from Sven Hedin.
And she got this message
that he wanted her to be happy
with her new husband.
And she thought that now
he has forgotten her.
So she got married
and he went to new expeditions.
Wounded and defiant, Hedin pushed
harder on his quest for fame.
Over the next 10 years,
this solitary,
driven man set out
to chart the earth's final frontiers.
He traveled more than a third
of the world's circumference,
mapping an area twice the breadth
of the United States.
He was the first to explore the mighty
Transhimalayan Mountains in Tibet,
the first to trace the source
of the Indus River.
I think that the ideal of Sven Hedin
was the strong and lonely man.
He said that the best thing with
the desert is that there are no people.
A real man was a lonely man.
His ideal was the lonely leader
who took his responsibility
and did great things for the nation,
for mankind.
As he put Central Asia and the
Silk Road back on the world's map,
Hedin became one of the most
celebrated explorers of the day.
On January 17th 1909,
Sven Hedin returned to Sweden a hero.
Sven's childhood dream had come true.
Thousands of Swedes were there
to greet him
just as they were for Nordenskiold,
But it still wasn't enough.
"The joy I felt to be reunited
with my parents and siblings
and to be greeted by
the old king was darkened
because she was not there
to greet me."
Alone in his moment of triumph,
Hedin craved adulation
on an ever larger stage.
It was a path that would ultimately
end in tragedy.
In 1914, Europe slipped
into world war.
As the conflict intensified,
Sven Hedin headed for the frontline
as a war correspondent
for the German high command.
There are many reasons why Sven Hedin
supported Germany throughout his life.
Germany, the scientific community,
always supported him.
He came from a background
in Stockholm
where one always were
close to the Germans,
so that was a natural thing.
But the really decisive factor
was his belief in geopolitics.
Like many Swedes, Hedin believed that
Germany was the only power
capable of protecting Sweden
from a Russian invasion.
When Germany lost the war,
allied countries like England and France
retracted the honors
they had bestowed on him.
Hedin was on the wrong side.
He would defiantly stay there
for the rest of his life.
Unperturbed, the explorer
focused on writing books
about his previous expeditions.
In 1920, Mille got back
in touch with him.
They had had some meetings.
She had children and she,
she wrote a letter to him.
That she could never forget,
forget him.
He was the love of her life,
and couldn't they get back together.
And he wrote back that you know
what is done is done.
Never turn back; 1,000 heavy steps
towards the goal,
but not one backwards.
Hedin returned to Central Asia:
the region he now
called his "frozen bride."
"She has held me captive
in her cold embrace,
and out of jealousy would not
let me love any other.
And I have been faithful to her,
that is certain."
Hedin's new project was to draw up
maps for a revolutionary new Silk Road
a massive motorway that would run
all the way to Vienna.
Hedin's pioneering maps were the basis
for the overland highway
that today links Asia with Europe.
"This highway should unite
two continents, Asia and Europe;
two cultures,
the Chinese and the Western."
Sven Hedin, the man who had rediscovered
the Silk Road 40 years earlier
had now given it a new lease of life.
The world famous explorer now
gambled his celebrity
on a highly controversial cause.
Hedin's achievements had attracted
influential admirers.
One was Adolf Hitler.
There was a special relation between
Sven Hedin and Adolf Hitler
who had only had two heroes in his
life, and one of them was Sven Hedin.
It was Sven Hedin's stories
that had kind of awakened
the young Adolf Hitler to the world.
So when they met in the '30s
and the beginning of the '40s,
Hitler wanted to talk about all the
heroic things that Sven Hedin had done.
Hedin, the attention seeker,
was flattered.
In 1936, he gave the opening speech
at the Olympic games in Berlin.
For Hedin, Germany had always been
a symbol of honor and discipline.
He would refuse to see that
the Third Reich was the cause
of the horrors to come.
In 1940, an eye disease that plagued
Hedin all his life resurfaced,
and the explorer went partially blind.
A Norwegian resistance fighter
was brought to Sven Hedin
to tell him about the torture
that he had sustained on the hands
of, of German soldiers.
And Hedin couldn't believe him
because it just didn't fit his image
of what a German soldier is.
And then the Resistance man told him
that his face was badly scarred.
And he took Sven Hedin's hand
and Sven Hedin could feel the scars.
And the story goes that Hedin's eyes
then are filled with tears
but still he couldn't believe that
a German soldier could do
something like that.
In 1945, when the atrocities of
Hitler's regime were undisputed,
Hedin chose to ignore them.
He was always very naively
attracted to these men of power.
And it's never as glaring as
when it comes to Adolf Hitler.
Sven Hedin simply didn't want to see
that this was an evil man.
"One thousand heavy steps
towards the goal.
Not one back."
The motto that led Hedin to triumph
in the desert
now led him to disgrace in Europe.
An unrepentant Nazi sympathizer,
Hedin was an international outcast.
Banished from the world stage,
the defiant explorer wrote about
his past in the limelight.
Hedin sent a letter to a friend's
"I understand that you will speak
at school about my travels in Asia.
Greet the deserts and mountains
when you speak to them,
but tell them that I do not long
after them anymore."
After World War II,
Hedin never returned to Asia.
When the Communists seized control
of China in 1949,
they severed all links with the West.
The Silk Road
Hedin's lifelong obsession
was once again abandoned.
Sven Hedin died in his sleep
in 1952 at the age of 87.
By his bed was a photo of his beloved
Mille, with an inscription on it:
"You have been by my side
on all my travels".
In the West stood a continent built
on lofty ideals and grand ambition.
In the East, towered an empire of
unimaginable size and splendor.
For thousands of years
these two civilizations had thrived
in seeming isolation.
Two men stepped into the void.
Marco Polo was lured by the promise
of unprecedented wealth.
Sven Hedin by a thirst for adventure
and the trappings of world fame.
Confronted by the most
daunting terrain on earth,
they went in search of the impossible
a lasting connection
between East and West
Along the old Silk Road.
Italy, 1296 A.D.
A Venetian trader languishes in jail
and wonders if he will ever get out.
His name is Marco Polo
and he's now a prisoner of war
the victim of an ongoing conflict
between Genoa and his native Venice.
Polo is afraid he will die here
in jail
and he's come up with
an amazing strategy for survival.
A book about his life and his travels.
An incredible story that might allow
his name to live on forever.
"There has been no man,
Christian or pagan,
Mongol or Indian,
or of any race whatsoever,
who has known or explored
so much of the world
and its great wonders as have I,
Marco Polo."
He writes about his incredible trek
across lethal mountains and deserts...
to Cathay, modern day China: a magical
country at the end of the earth.
A land so wealthy that its ruler could
entertain 40,000 guests at a time.
A civilization so advanced they could
predict the movement of the heavens.
A culture so generous that husbands
even shared their wives with strangers.
Marco Polo's book was a success.
His journey to Cathay
has become one of the most famous
adventure stories ever written.
But it is full of such incredible
tales of discovery
and intrigue that it leaves everyone
wondering the same thing:
Could it possibly be true?
Or is Polo's adventure
along the old Silk Road
actually a masterpiece
of the imagination?
In the first century B.C.,
imperial Rome dominated the west,
Han China the east.
A world apart, these two superpowers
knew little of each other's existence.
The seductive beauty of
one substance drew them closer.
It all began in Mesopotamia. 53 B.C.
Roman legions were on the brink of
a historic victory
against the Parthian army.
Unexpectedly,
the Parthians unfurled huge banners
of a magical translucent material.
The Roman army had never seen anything
like it, and fled in confusion
leaving 20,000 dead
on the battlefield.
Fear turned to fascination
and silk quickly became
the rage in ancient Rome.
The Chinese fabric was soon
worth its weight in gold.
Traders saw their chance.
Caravans braved the 5000 miles
separating China and Rome.
Cities sprung up in the deserts
and plains to service the traders.
Along with the goods flowed ideas
that revolutionized
the cultures along the way.
Buddhism and Islam spread eastwards.
Printing and papermaking went West.
The Silk Road pioneering connection
between East and West was established.
People have a mental vision
that the Silk Road is like I95,
a huge long highway
and that one person took some silk
from one end all the way to the other.
And in fact
that almost never happened.
Merchants would take the goods
from one oasis to another
and then another group of merchants
would take them on.
So I think the Silk Road
is not the road.
I think the most important things are
those communities along the Silk Road.
For nearly a thousand years
these communities thrived.
In the 10th century,
China collapsed in civil war,
and it was no longer safe
to travel in the East.
In the chaos,
the Silk Road fell silent.
The desert cities that depended on
its traffic were abandoned.
As shifting sands buried their memory,
the link between
East and West was broken.
a young boy named Marco Polo
was born in Venice, Italy.
Marco grew up a forgotten orphan
on the docks and canals of the city.
Marco Polo did not have a conventional
and happy childhood.
His father left before he was born
and his mother died
when he was relatively young.
But actually that
relatively unhappy childhood
provided him with certain skills
that would turn out to be
very important for him on his travels.
He learned to get along with
a wide variety of peoples.
One day Marco's world was turned
upside down.
A stranger walked into his life.
It was his father.
It was the first time
the two had ever met.
And the boy listened in awe as his
father explained his 14 year absence.
He said he had made
an incredible overland journey
to a magical land in the East.
He talked about a foreign people
the Mongols
and their massive empire,
the biggest the world had ever seen.
And explained how he had just
risked his life
to personally visit its capital
in Cathay, modern day China.
Young Marco was stunned.
China, in the 13th Century
to a Venetian,
is probably the most foreign place
that there is,
maybe like the South Pole
is to us today.
That you can go
but it's a huge journey.
Not many people go.
There are incredible
logistical difficulties.
Marco's father also claimed
to have risen to favor with
Kublai Khan, the new Mongol king.
He insisted he was sitting
on a gold mine.
For with the Khan's favor,
he would have prime access to
all the treasures of the East.
If the Polos could make it
to China and back again,
they'd be able to reestablish
overland trade links
between two very
wealthy civilizations.
The sudden reappearance of his father
must have stimulated him
to think about perhaps joining him
on a travel of his own.
Going to China for Marco Polo
would be the most extraordinary
adventure of his entire life.
They probably don't suspect they're
going to get all the way to China.
But I think there's enough talk
at the time about modern,
what's now Turkey or what's now Iran
that he would have been very excited.
Marco imagined his journey
to the east
the wealth of Cathay,
the dangers ahead.
Some would say that an imaginary
journey is all that he ever took.
According to his story, Marco Polo
set off for China in 1271 A.D.
a merchant in search of
the world's wealthiest market.
His 5000 mile overland journey took
him through Tabriz, Baghdad, Hormuz
the great bazaars of the Middle East
where the trading energy of
the old Silk Road is still alive.
Marco was encouraged by what he saw.
"Traveling merchants
can make very good money.
For there is much gold and silk
cloth of great value."
Camping out in the open at night,
Marco was careful to protect his profits.
Anybody who traveled on the Silk Roads
had to be really quite
brave and courageous.
Many people just didn't make it,
in part because of banditry
all along the route.
One night in Persia,
Polo claims to have been robbed.
Many of his caravan were killed.
Marco was lucky to get away
with his life.
It's not as simple as taking a plane
in Venice and hopping over to Beijing.
This was a long, long
and demanding journey.
After a grueling trek through
modern day Iran and Afghanistan,
Polo describes his confrontation
with the Pamirs,
the infamous mountain range
that separates East and West.
altitude and frostbite were
the least of Polo's problems.
"There are innumerable wolves
and the bones of their kill
are stacked by the roadside
to serve as landmarks to travelers
in the bleak winter."
Polo sought refuge in local villages.
"I give you my word that
if a stranger comes to a house here
to seek hospitality
he receives a very warm welcome.
The host bids his wife do everything
that the guest wishes.
The women are beautiful,
vivacious and always ready to please."
Marco Polo's description of
these enticing beauties of the East,
of their being so subservient fits in
with a pattern that has continued
throughout the ages of eastern women
having some sort of exotic
and erotic appeal.
There's an attempt to make the east
more exotic than it really is.
According to his story,
Polo now entered the Taklamakan desert
the most forbidding obstacle
along the old Silk Road.
With 1000 foot high dunes
and swirling sandstorms,
the Taklamakan is 600 miles of hell.
The Chinese call it
the desert of death.
The temperature of the desert is formidable.
In the summer, the temperature
can reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
There's no water, in the desert.
There's no wells.
So you're walking through
a sea of sand
and it's very difficult to think that
you might come out the other end.
It is here that Polo and his story
walk into a heated controversy.
Did Polo really make it
across the Taklamakan into China?
Or is the story of his arrival
in the East a complete fabrication?
Marco Polo has a format
when he travels.
He goes from city to city.
He tells you where he is
and he tells you how far it is
from one point to the next.
When he goes to visit the Mongol
capital he departs from that format.
He no longer tells you
the cities in between
where he is in north China
and what's at the Mongol capital.
So the effect when you're reading it
is very abrupt.
Did he go, how did he go,
what cities are in between?
And the only conclusion
I can draw is he didn't go,
that somebody told him about it
and he just adds it in.
This was a custom of travel writing
during that time.
You'd hear something and you'd claim
that you actually had been
and had actually witnessed the events
that somebody else told you about.
This has been taken by some scholars
to mean that he probably didn't travel
all the way to China.
That is taking things
a little too far.
Marco Polo wrote about his travels
while he was in prison.
That obviously is going to affect
the way he presents his information.
He's at a difficult time in his life
and he wants to attract an audience
so he's going to emphasize
the strangest and the most interesting
rather than the ordinary elements
of his travels.
From his squalid cell in Italy,
Marco wrote about the luxurious court
of Kublai Khan, the Mongol king,
which he supposedly reached in 1275.
He told how in Shengdu,
the city later immortalized as Xanadu,
the trials of his 4 year journey
suddenly seemed worthwhile.
"The Khan's palace is the largest
in the world.
The roof is ablaze with every color
it glitters like crystals and sparkles
from afar.
The hall is so vast that
it could seat 6000 for one banquet."
The descriptions that Marco Polo
provides for us,
descriptions of Xanadu for example,
the summer palace of Kublai Khan
dovetail with what we know of
the archeology of that city.
The city was excavated
in the 1930s by the Japanese
and they found that the placement of
the buildings
and the style of the buildings
was exactly the way Marco Polo
had described them.
The Venetian trader
was equally impressed, it seems,
by the mighty Yangtze river.
"It is the greatest river
in the world.
More boats loaded with more dear
things and of greater value come and go
by this river than by all the rivers
and seas used by the Christians."
Marco could not have asked for more.
He had made it safely to China.
He had discovered a land of
unimaginable wealth.
His quest to establish a lucrative
trade connection with the east
was very much on course.
It is here,
on the threshold of his dream,
that Marco's account
turns fantastical.
He says that he sees a fish that's a
hundred feet long that has fur on it.
He describes how the animals bow
to visitors at the Khan's court.
Like the tigers came out
and they take a bow on cue.
So you know it's just things that
when you read it cannot have happened.
The bizarre sections in Marco Polo
of animal headed people
and strange looking fish,
this is something that is not unusual.
The conventions of travel writing
during that time fit in with
the kind of mythologizing and
fantasizing that Marco Polo includes.
Equally controversial is
the total absence of any reference
to unique Chinese rituals
that would have amazed a European
seeing them for the first time.
Marco Polo does not mention certain
characteristics of China
such as calligraphy, tea, bound feet
because Marco Polo lived
among the Mongols.
He dealt with Kublai Khan and the
other members of the Mongol nobility.
He didn't deal with the Chinese.
So just because he didn't mention
those things
doesn't mean that
he didn't reach China.
Marco Polo's defenders
point to details
which could not have been
invented in Europe.
"Throughout the province of Cathay
there are large black stones
dug from the mountains which burn
and make flames like logs."
Marco Polo was the first European
to ever write about coal
a treasure that transformed the world.
Marco Polo was definitely in China.
I am absolutely convinced of it because
of the tremendous detail in his book
his descriptions of the Mongols:
Mongol customs, Mongol dress,
Mongol attitudes towards women.
And in addition he describes
specific events so clearly.
The assassination of
a finance minister.
Now who would have known about that
if you hadn't been in China?
The reason I don't think Marco Polo
went to China is that
there are basic factual inaccuracies
in the book.
He says he's the governor of a town
and we have a list of governors
of that town, Yangzhou,
and he's not on the list.
And the second is he says he's
at a battle that took place in 1273
and we know the battle took place in
Perhaps the secret to the mystery of
Polo's account
lies in his prison cell in Italy.
Marco did not write the book himself.
He dictated it,
during his year in jail,
to his cellmate, Rustichello
who happened to be a writer
with a passion for fairytales.
Rustichello was a man
whose renowned for writing romances
and not actual descriptions of events.
And so obviously the fact that
Rustichello rather than Marco Polo
set down the work may have added some
of these legendary
and mythical qualities to the work
that Marco Polo had not intended.
The only verifiable piece of evidence
from Polo's life
his will reveals that
he died a wealthy man.
Yet his nickname"Il Milione"
the big one
mockingly referred to the size of
his imagination, not his bank balance.
Marco was defiant till the end.
When asked by his friends
on his deathbed in 1324
whether he had really been
to China, Marco replied:
"I have only told you half of
what I saw."
Marco Polo died
surrounded by doubters,
yet his influence on the history
of exploration is undisputed.
His controversial book became the
bible for a new generation of explorers.
The inspiration for
Christopher Columbus'
historic discovery
of the new world.
The greatest impact Marco Polo has
on later explorers is planting the idea
that you can go to exotic places
and write about them and become famous.
When you think about it nobody
before him is famous as an explorer.
So he becomes the first famous
explorer, adventurer.
Whether Marco Polo did make it China
or not, one thing is certain.
His dream of pioneering
a trade connection
between East and West
was never realized.
China again dissolved into civil war,
making travel in the East impossible.
The tantalizing promise of
the Silk Road
once again faded into the past
craving fulfillment in another age.
set out in Marco Polo's footsteps.
Unlike Polo, Sven Hedin was not
in search of wealth.
He was after something
far more elusive and dangerous.
Stockholm, Sweden. 1949.
Sven Hedin, the 84 year old explorer,
prepares a memoir of his life.
In his prime he heroically explored
the earth's final frontier.
He discovered lost cities
of the Silk Road,
bringing to life
a forgotten civilization.
Hedin, the ambitious adventurer,
had won the adulation of the world.
He was the Neil Armstrong of his day.
You know, Inner Asia was the moon.
And he went.
He was very famous,
a rock star at the time.
But his passion for the spotlight
led to a very dangerous liaison.
After the war, Sven Hedin was
obliterated from the memory of Europe.
He was a persona non grata.
Nobody wanted to touch him
after the second world war.
Sven Hedin was really a person
who you couldn't associate with.
In his memoir, Sven Hedin has
one last chance to redeem himself.
Would he exorcise the demons
of his past?
Or would he die a forgotten man?
April 24th, 1880.
his childhood hero returns triumphant.
Stockholm harbor is a riot of
pride and excitement.
Adolf Nordenskiold,
the Swedish explorer, has come home
the first person to sail around
Russia back to Europe.
Together with his family
he had climbed the mountains
overlooking the harbor of Stockholm,
from where he and thousands
and thousands of Stockholm people
watched the return of the ship.
A great national hero was created
and Sven Hedin really wanted
to step into his footsteps.
This dream of fame and adventure
would drive Hedin all his life.
It was in Berlin,
as a geography student
that Hedin developed his lifelong
obsession with central Asia.
At the turn of the 20th century,
Central Asia was one of
the last unexplored frontiers on earth.
the distant prize of aspiring
explorers and world statesmen alike.
For it was the center of
a brooding cold war:
a race between Britain,
Russia and China
to expand their empires in the region.
With the eyes of the world focused on
this remote land,
it was the perfect stage
for the ambitious Hedin
to make his name as an explorer.
At its heart, was a massive sea
of sand known as the Taklamakan.
When Hedin decided on becoming
an explorer, he wanted deserts.
Explorers should climb
dangerous mountains
and they should cross
dangerous deserts.
That's what an explorer should do.
So he found this Taklamakan
which according to him,
no one ever had crossed,
in living memory at least.
He wanted to be the first,
to walk on paths
where no man ever walked before.
Hedin was sure that beneath
the Taklamakan's shifting sand
lay ancient cities of
the old Silk Road
which had been lost to the world
for over a thousand years.
If only he could discover
the lost cities of the Silk Road,
Hedin believed his path to fame
would be secure.
In 1893, Hedin obtained funding
from the king of Sweden
to explore the uncharted extremes
of central Asia.
But his imminent departure
was bittersweet.
Hedin was leaving behind the woman
of his dreams.
Mille Bruman was beautiful
and very wealthy.
Like Hedin, she was a romantic.
He adored her.
"She was magnificent in her youth,
innocence and beauty.
She was blonde and had eyes of
the most beautiful color."
In Sven's mind, there was no doubt
they would marry when he got back.
Kashi, modern day China.
Once known as Kashgar, a key market
town along the old Silk Road.
Sven Hedin arrived here in 1894,
after a grueling year long journey.
Kashi was the obvious base
for Hedin's expedition
for it stood on the edge
of the Taklamakan
the desert Hedin had come to explore.
With thousand foot sand dunes
and 130 degree summer heat,
the desert is one of the most
forbidding places on earth.
Hedin began to make
careful preparations
for an expedition into the desert,
when devastating news arrived.
When he was sitting there
waiting for his camels there
came a letter from home
where somebody wrote that his love,
Mille Maria Bruman, was going to
get engaged with someone else.
And his whole world shattered.
And he writes about his desperation
that now nothing was worth anything.
He would do this absolutely
crazy thing.
He would just venture into the desert
and see what would come out of it.
Hedin was heartbroken.
Distraught and totally ill equipped,
he set off on a suicidal quest
to find a lost city in the desert.
He walked through the streets
and the people formed lines
and they cheered him and they cried
and they said you will go
to the desert of death
and you will never come out alive.
And he walked through the streets
with his laden camels
and people said his camels
are too heavy.
They'll not make it, he'll not
come back from the desert of death.
They walked out to the edge of
the desert and disappeared.
"One thousand heavy steps
towards the goal.
Not one backwards was my motto."
Stubborn and defiant,
Hedin had started a deathmarch.
Hedin realized his guides
had not brought enough water.
The expedition was now in the middle
of the deadliest desert on earth
with only two days of water left.
Should they turn back?
Or look for an oasis?
Hedin, as ever, chose to push on.
Straight into the Karaburan
an infamous storm that whips the sand
into a punishing frenzy.
His expedition was now lost
in the dreaded Taklamakan.
The name 'Taklamakan'
from the Uighur translates is
"you go in but you do not come out."
By 9 o'clock in the morning
having spent 2 and a half hours
loading your camels to get ready
for the day's march,
you could have drunk the water
by then,
let alone keep it and have
precious sips throughout the day,
to try and cover a pitiful
maybe five miles at most.
Because the nature
of the sand dunes is such
you can't go in a straight line
or very fast.
Then the sand just gets into
every part of your body
your nose, your eyes,
your ears just become blocked with it.
And your lips were split.
Your tongue was swollen and sticking
to the roof of your mouth.
Over the course of the next 5 days,
died from dehydration,
and one collapsed with exhaustion.
Finally Hedin and a local guide,
stumbled across footsteps
which they prayed would lead to water.
"Why should I die,
in the embraces of this deceitful
desert, for an unfaithful girl?
I will conquer the desert
and return home a hero
and all my people will see it
as a manly and courageous deed."
But the footsteps were their own.
They had walked in a circle.
The guide gave up, leaving Hedin alone
to crawl to a parched death.
He struggled on.
After 6 days without water,
Hedin finally found the Khotan river.
Luck and unbelievable perseverance
had saved him.
His whole life was characterized by
this will to achieve to prove himself,
to prove that he was not a failure.
The failure that he had become
when she turned him down.
Six months after his first disaster,
Hedin was back in the Taklamakan.
More determined than ever
to find the footsteps to fame.
One night, a local brought Hedin
some woodcarvings he had found
in the desert.
Mysterious objects which might lead
him to the lost civilization
buried beneath the sand.
"In spite of my misfortunes
the previous spring,
I was again drawn irresistibly
toward the mysterious country
under the eternal sand."
This expedition was different.
The water bottles were full,
the winter air cooler.
After a 5 day trek
into the Taklamakan,
Hedin finally came across
signs of an abandoned city.
He stopped and looked for
confirmation.
The evidence was undeniable.
He had found Dandanuilik,
a lost city of the Silk Road.
"No explorer had an inkling,
up till now,
of the existence of this ancient city.
Here I stand, like the prince
in the enchanted wood,
having wakened to new life a city
which has slumbered for
a thousand years."
Hedin's discovery was just
a beginning.
It started one of the greatest
archeological races of the 20th century.
Hedin's main contribution
to the Silk Road is that
he starts the race to discover
all the Silk Road sites.
He is never the person who figures out
the historical significance
of any given site.
But, he's the person
who gets other people to go
and figure those things out.
Using Hedin's pioneering maps,
famous archeologists
like Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot
raced desperately to find other
lost cities of the Silk Road.
For these Europeans, it was much
more than a race for buried treasure.
It was a battle to appropriate
the history of an area
they hoped to control in the future.
The Silk Road, a forgotten ideal,
was once again a global concern.
Despite his success,
Hedin was still infatuated with Mille.
The proud Swede wrote her a letter,
wishing her happiness
with her future husband.
She was at that time
on vacation in Norway
and she had decided to
break up the engagement
because the one she really loved
was Sven Hedin.
So she wrote this letter to
Sven Hedin.
She went to the post office
to drop it in the post box
and the postman says oh here's
a letter for you from Sven Hedin.
And she got this message
that he wanted her to be happy
with her new husband.
And she thought that now
he has forgotten her.
So she got married
and he went to new expeditions.
Wounded and defiant, Hedin pushed
harder on his quest for fame.
Over the next 10 years,
this solitary,
driven man set out
to chart the earth's final frontiers.
He traveled more than a third
of the world's circumference,
mapping an area twice the breadth
of the United States.
He was the first to explore the mighty
Transhimalayan Mountains in Tibet,
the first to trace the source
of the Indus River.
I think that the ideal of Sven Hedin
was the strong and lonely man.
He said that the best thing with
the desert is that there are no people.
A real man was a lonely man.
His ideal was the lonely leader
who took his responsibility
and did great things for the nation,
for mankind.
As he put Central Asia and the
Silk Road back on the world's map,
Hedin became one of the most
celebrated explorers of the day.
On January 17th 1909,
Sven Hedin returned to Sweden a hero.
Sven's childhood dream had come true.
Thousands of Swedes were there
to greet him
just as they were for Nordenskiold,
But it still wasn't enough.
"The joy I felt to be reunited
with my parents and siblings
and to be greeted by
the old king was darkened
because she was not there
to greet me."
Alone in his moment of triumph,
Hedin craved adulation
on an ever larger stage.
It was a path that would ultimately
end in tragedy.
In 1914, Europe slipped
into world war.
As the conflict intensified,
Sven Hedin headed for the frontline
as a war correspondent
for the German high command.
There are many reasons why Sven Hedin
supported Germany throughout his life.
Germany, the scientific community,
always supported him.
He came from a background
in Stockholm
where one always were
close to the Germans,
so that was a natural thing.
But the really decisive factor
was his belief in geopolitics.
Like many Swedes, Hedin believed that
Germany was the only power
capable of protecting Sweden
from a Russian invasion.
When Germany lost the war,
allied countries like England and France
retracted the honors
they had bestowed on him.
Hedin was on the wrong side.
He would defiantly stay there
for the rest of his life.
Unperturbed, the explorer
focused on writing books
about his previous expeditions.
In 1920, Mille got back
in touch with him.
They had had some meetings.
She had children and she,
she wrote a letter to him.
That she could never forget,
forget him.
He was the love of her life,
and couldn't they get back together.
And he wrote back that you know
what is done is done.
Never turn back; 1,000 heavy steps
towards the goal,
but not one backwards.
Hedin returned to Central Asia:
the region he now
called his "frozen bride."
"She has held me captive
in her cold embrace,
and out of jealousy would not
let me love any other.
And I have been faithful to her,
that is certain."
Hedin's new project was to draw up
maps for a revolutionary new Silk Road
a massive motorway that would run
all the way to Vienna.
Hedin's pioneering maps were the basis
for the overland highway
that today links Asia with Europe.
"This highway should unite
two continents, Asia and Europe;
two cultures,
the Chinese and the Western."
Sven Hedin, the man who had rediscovered
the Silk Road 40 years earlier
had now given it a new lease of life.
The world famous explorer now
gambled his celebrity
on a highly controversial cause.
Hedin's achievements had attracted
influential admirers.
One was Adolf Hitler.
There was a special relation between
Sven Hedin and Adolf Hitler
who had only had two heroes in his
life, and one of them was Sven Hedin.
It was Sven Hedin's stories
that had kind of awakened
the young Adolf Hitler to the world.
So when they met in the '30s
and the beginning of the '40s,
Hitler wanted to talk about all the
heroic things that Sven Hedin had done.
Hedin, the attention seeker,
was flattered.
In 1936, he gave the opening speech
at the Olympic games in Berlin.
For Hedin, Germany had always been
a symbol of honor and discipline.
He would refuse to see that
the Third Reich was the cause
of the horrors to come.
In 1940, an eye disease that plagued
Hedin all his life resurfaced,
and the explorer went partially blind.
A Norwegian resistance fighter
was brought to Sven Hedin
to tell him about the torture
that he had sustained on the hands
of, of German soldiers.
And Hedin couldn't believe him
because it just didn't fit his image
of what a German soldier is.
And then the Resistance man told him
that his face was badly scarred.
And he took Sven Hedin's hand
and Sven Hedin could feel the scars.
And the story goes that Hedin's eyes
then are filled with tears
but still he couldn't believe that
a German soldier could do
something like that.
In 1945, when the atrocities of
Hitler's regime were undisputed,
Hedin chose to ignore them.
He was always very naively
attracted to these men of power.
And it's never as glaring as
when it comes to Adolf Hitler.
Sven Hedin simply didn't want to see
that this was an evil man.
"One thousand heavy steps
towards the goal.
Not one back."
The motto that led Hedin to triumph
in the desert
now led him to disgrace in Europe.
An unrepentant Nazi sympathizer,
Hedin was an international outcast.
Banished from the world stage,
the defiant explorer wrote about
his past in the limelight.
Hedin sent a letter to a friend's
"I understand that you will speak
at school about my travels in Asia.
Greet the deserts and mountains
when you speak to them,
but tell them that I do not long
after them anymore."
After World War II,
Hedin never returned to Asia.
When the Communists seized control
of China in 1949,
they severed all links with the West.
The Silk Road
Hedin's lifelong obsession
was once again abandoned.
Sven Hedin died in his sleep
in 1952 at the age of 87.
By his bed was a photo of his beloved
Mille, with an inscription on it:
"You have been by my side
on all my travels".