Welcome to the Marco Polo Project

This site is an archive for our organisation, which ran from 2011 to 2023. As all dynamic organisations, Marco Polo Project went through multiple iterations: from 2016 to 2023, we mainly worked on original event design for intercultural understanding. From 2011 to 2016, our centre of gravity was a digital website bringing the Chinese blogosphere to Western readers. You can find an archive of that magazine at marcopolomuseum.wordpress.com. On this – read along.

Why we existed

The 21st century is a period of fast change and movement. People are migrating en masse, and will continue to do so. We can expect up to a billion climate refugees expected by 2050. Meanwhile, environmental pressures and technological evolution herald a period when professional (and personal) lives will be anything but predictable.

As people face a constant shift in their identities and solidarity networks, under the joint impact of migration and industrial disruptions, we need collective structures that can act as shock absorbers.

In companies, neighbourhoods, learning institutions, or informal ‘communities’ of all sorts, we need the right mindsets and methods to continuously renegotiate what is to be considered common world, common knowledge, common language, common sense, and common morality.

Inventing those methods was the purpose of Marco Polo Project.

What we did

Marco Polo Project believes our uncertain future demands new ways of coming together to create a better world for everyone. 

We have worked with diverse communities that gather people from all over the world. Our organisation improved people’s capacity to learn from and with each other. 

How we folded

The COVID pandemic was a hard hit for us. We were finding a sustainable balance by working with universities, as our first external CEO replaced our founder. Funding ceased in 2020. We put our activities on pause while we re-imagine our mode, and continued running Translation Club meetup twice weekly. We formally closed in 2023, but our open resources remain accessible, and a descendant of translation club is still running in Tokyo.

If you’re interested in our work, we would love to hear from you. For any question, contact Julien Leyre, founder and acting caretaker.