Did Marco Polo really go to China?

The claim, and the verdict

The claim, from sceptics: Marco Polo never reached China. He may have got no further than the Black Sea or Persia, and stitched together his famous book from what merchants told him and from Persian or Arabic guidebooks.

The verdict: the sceptics raised fair questions, but the evidence on balance shows he was there. His book is not a reliable diary. It was written down by a romance writer, exaggerates Polo's own importance, and survives in about 150 manuscripts that differ from one another. But it contains too many specific, checkable details about the Mongol Yuan dynasty, details that match Chinese sources Europeans could not read, to have been assembled at second hand.

The story Marco Polo told

Marco was born in Venice around 1254. In 1271, aged about seventeen, he set out with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo, who had already been to the court of Kublai Khan. They reached Kublai's summer capital at Shangdu around 1275. Marco says he served the Khan for about seventeen years, travelling on missions through China and beyond. Around 1291 the Polos left by sea, escorting a Mongol princess to be married in Persia, and they reached Venice in 1295.

In about 1298 Marco was a prisoner of Genoa, Venice's rival. In prison he met Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of Arthurian romances, and dictated his account to him. The book, in a mix of French and Italian, is known as Le Devisement du monde (The Description of the World) or, in Italian, Il Milione. Marco Polo died in Venice on 8 January 1324. His will survives.

The case against: what sceptics pointed out

Doubts are old, but the modern case was made by Frances Wood, then head of the Chinese section of the British Library, in her book Did Marco Polo Go to China? (1995). Her main points:

• No Chinese or Mongol source names Marco Polo, although he claims high office, including governing the city of Yangzhou for three years.
• The book leaves out things a visitor could hardly miss: the Great Wall, tea drinking, women's bound feet, chopsticks, Chinese writing and woodblock printing.
• Polo says he and his relatives helped Kublai take the city of Xiangyang by building siege engines, but Chinese records show the siege ended in 1273, before they arrived.
• Many place names are given in Persian forms, as if from a Persian source rather than from Chinese speakers.
• Some passages read like a guidebook rather than an eyewitness account.

The case for: what the evidence shows

Vogel's study, from the University of Tübingen, is the strongest single piece of evidence. Polo describes how paper money was made from mulberry bark and stamped with the Khan's seal, how salt was boiled and pressed into cakes used as money in the southwest, and how cowrie shells circulated in Yunnan. These are not things a traveller in Persia would hear about in such detail, and Chinese records confirm them.

The missing items have answers too. The Great Wall as we picture it was mostly built by the Ming dynasty in the 1500s, long after Polo; in his day there were older earthen walls, many in ruins. Polo moved among Mongols, Persians and other foreigners who ran the Yuan state, which would explain Persian place names and his silence on Chinese customs such as tea. And the claim about Xiangyang and the governorship look like boasting, perhaps Rustichello's, rather than proof he was never there.

What Marco Polo actually said about China

He was most amazed by money and cities. He described the Khan making money from the bark of mulberry trees, printed on paper and accepted everywhere in his lands on pain of death. He called Hangzhou, which he knew as Kinsay, the finest and noblest city in the world, with its lake, canals and many bridges. Both descriptions are in The Travels, written around 1298.

The Dominican friar Jacopo d'Acqui, writing a few years after Polo's death, recorded that when friends urged him on his deathbed to take back the incredible parts of his book, Polo replied that he had not told half of what he saw. It is a reported remark, not his own writing, but it shows that the doubts began in his lifetime.

You can question him about the doubts directly by talking with Marco Polo in Yuga, by voice or text. It is an AI recreation drawn from his book and the record, not the man himself, and it can be wrong, so quote the book and the scholars in your work.

How the doubt spread, and how to check a travel story

Readers in Venice nicknamed the book Il Milione, possibly from a family nickname, though it came to suggest a million tall tales. The modern debate was taken up by newspapers in 1995 because Wood's question made a great headline. It is a good example of a reasonable scholarly doubt growing into a popular “fact” that runs ahead of the evidence.

1. List what the author gets right that he could not easily have learned at second hand.
2. List what he gets wrong, and ask whether errors look like boasting, faulty memory, or ignorance.
3. Look for independent records: here, Yuan documents and the Venetian will.
4. Check which manuscript or translation you are reading. Polo's book survives in many versions.

For more, compare him with another great traveller in Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, see the greatest explorers in history, or use the method in how to check if a quote is real.