Jacob of Ancona

The City of Light or The City Of Light: The Hidden Journal of the Man Who Entered China Four Years Before Marco Polo is a book purportedly made by a scholarly Jewish merchant called "Jacob d'Ancona" who wrote in vernacular Italian, an account of a trading venture he made, in which he reached China in 1271, four years before Marco Polo. The narrative contains political debates about the future of the city in which he engaged with the aid of a translator of mixed Italian and Chinese ancestry. Due to many red-flag elements both in the book's content and its origin, it is widely considered to be a forgery written by David Selbourne, its alleged translator to English. Critics indicated that The City of Light is rather a retrojected allegory mapping suspiciously well onto late-20th-century Western political concerns than an authentic medieval Jewish travelogue.

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