Genghis Khan instituted the Yam, a network of horse relay stations across the Mongol Empire that could move messages 300–400 km per day, effectively creating the fastest communication system the pre-modern world had seen.

Marco Polo's description of the Yam astonished European readers and inspired wonder at the scale of Asian civilization; it fed the medieval European imagination of the East as impossibly vast and fast, influencing travel narratives and later Romantic poetry about the Orient.