Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. By castaway this week is the writer and historian Francis Wood.

As head of the Chinese collections at the British Library, she is effectively the gatekeeper to some of the rarest and most precious documents in the world.

Her life's been immersed in the language and culture of the Far East.

And along the way she's also spent time throwing hand grenades, planting rice seedlings in the

paddy fields and bundling Chinese cabbages. She is a powerful advocate for a land

that's often perceived in the West as impenetrable. From China's extraordinary history to its

arrivals and economic superpower it is she says a bottomless pit of interesting stuff.

Her books have included an exploration of life during the Cultural Revolution

and an unpicking of one of China's most well-known visitors,

the Italian merchant Marco Polo.

He didn't, she suggests, ever set foot in the the place we're going to come to the hand

grenades and the paddy fields a little later I hope Francis would but let's let's start

with Marco Polo we all think we know that he did go, indeed we all spent much of our childhood in school

studying the fact that he went and told us all about it.

That's wrong, is it?

There's, I think, absolutely no definite proof that he was. that's

I think absolutely no definite proof that he went.

The little manuscripts that we have which say they are the book of Marco Polo or they

are a description of the world

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