Did Marco Polo Go To China?

Marco Polo, international globetrotter extraordinaire who visited China in the late thirteenth century, returning to Europe to pen the immortal The Travels of Marco Polo, needs no introduction. Not only is the book well known throughout the western world as a compendium of wonders from the mysterious Orient in medieval times, it was regarded as a trustworthy source of geographical and historic facts by serious scholars as well as lay readers. Great explorers from Christopher Columbus to Sir Martin Frobisher all allegedly carried the book with them on their outings. Yet, for hundreds of years the authenticity of this very same book has been debated over and over. Did Marco Polo in fact visit China? Was the book a fraud? In fact, did Marco Polo as a real person even exist?

The causes of skepticism are numerous and varied. They range from blatant inaccuracies contained in the book, implausible events, baffling descriptives, to obvious embellishments and omissions. Author Frances Wood has expertly summarized most of these issues in her book Did Marco Polo Go To China? (Westview Press, 1995). However, many Polo enthusiasts continue to champion his cause, dismissing all opposing arguments as baseless and inconclusive, and simply ignoring any and all contrary views and analyses.

Before diving headstrong into a protracted discussion on the issues of his travels, let us begin by acknowledging that a person of flesh and blood named Marco Polo did once live, what with the existence of legal documents relating him over money disputes. Records also support the assertion that his family participated in international trade. His uncle Niccolo Polo owned houses in Constantinople and in Sudak in Crimea. History tells us that at the time Black Sea was under the control of the Golden Horde Mongols, who assigned its navigational rights to Italians operating there. As a result there was a major Italian settlement at the Crimea. Ironically these Italians later were to deal these fearful Mongols a devastating defeat.

Besides these bits of attestation, there is preciously little direct evidence about the Polos’ lives and activities. Most of what we know of Marco Polo comes from his book, and a number of secondary sources written centuries after his death, and which were themselves mostly derived from this same work.

As given in the prologue to his travels, Marco’s father and uncle, Maffeo and Niccolo Polo, were Venetian merchants. In 1260 they traveled to Constantinople on a trade mission. From Constantinople they then went on across the Black Sea toward the east, arriving at Sudak. Then they continued on to the Caspian Sea, across the northern Asian steppes, and finally arriving at Karakorum, the Mongol capitol city, where they met the great Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. In fact the Great Khan was so impressed with their insights that he sent the Polos back to Europe to invite a hundred learned men to come to Mongolia to instruct the pagan nomads of this new Christian faith. The Polos failed to requisition the requested Papal delegation, ostensibly because the papal court was going through difficulties in selecting its next pontiff, so they took off again for Mongolia in 1271, this time taking young Marco Polo along. Marco was about seventeen at the time. At the Mongol Court Marco made a great impression on the Great Khan, who sent him on official missions. Marco Polo thus served the Khan for seventeen years, performing various duties at the behest of the Mongol ruler, traveling throughout China and Asia (and, to many adherents, the world). Thus, by definition, Marco Polo was a viceroy of Kublai Khan; and that also suggests that he was neither trading nor indulging in commerce as a merchant, although this bit of inconsistency does not appear to bother most scholars of the Marco Polo affair.

Most who are even superficially familiar with the Marco Polo story know that he did not write his travelogue. In prison in 1298 as a result of getting involved in a war between the Venetians and the Genoans, he dictated his experiences in the East to a fellow cellmate named Rustichello, who physically penned the travelogue. Rustichello was the thirteenth century author of two Arthurian romances, and Marco Polo’s travelogue contains numerous passages written in Rustichello’s style. However, most also agree that it is unlikely that Rustichello wrote the travelogue by himself and merely used Marco Polo’s name for promotion purposes. Rustichello obviously lacked independent access to the travel details. Therefore, collaboration between the two men is generally accepted, given that as an itinerant trader Marco Polo might even be illiterate.

The pedigree of Polo’s Travel as a literary work is somewhat murky. Many versions of it exist. Today some one hundred forty (or more) copies of the work have survived, and they offer a diverse and intriguing topical coverage. One “Toledo” edition has a major section on Russia that is unique. Clearly different authors have had their hands at it through the ages. This is fact, not conjecture.

The earliest copy hinted at was one from 1307. Nonetheless, we no longer have any original copy of that work. Most of the copies we now have spring from a certain editor named Giovanni Baptisto Ramusio (d. 1557). He claimed to have based his edition on an earlier 1438 copy (note the timing). In this version there are descriptions of Hangzhou and Manichaeans of Fuzhou that are not found in other editions.

As a work of historical records—it concerns a real person’s real personal travel experiences—Marco Polo’s Travel is full of contradictions, if not out-right errors, some more serious than others. To begin with, The Travels of Marco Polo as a book title is a misnomer, although the version by The Orion Press based on a fourteenth century manuscript preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France, which I used for my research, bears precisely such a name. The real name of the book is Divisament dou Monde; that is, Description of the World. Yet as a personal “reality” work ghostwritten by a romance novelist the book is uncharacteristically unromantic.

While one expects a travelogue to be written in the first person, such as “I awoke early on the third day of March and…,” The Travels of Marco Polo is written almost entirely in the third person, such as in Chapter 21: “Leaving Kobiam you proceed over a desert of eight days’ journey exposed to great drought...” or from Chapter 29, “at the end of ten days’ journey from the city of Gouza, you arrive (as has been said) at the kingdom of Ta-in-fu…” The prose is impersonal and clinical, totally out of character of a romantic novel. The work looks more like a traveler’s guide issued by a government office of tourism than a record of one’s personal encounters.

This peculiarity is further exacerbated by the haphazard nature of the book’s topical structure. Instead of proceeding directly from a starting point to an ending point and returning, as typical of a travelogue, the book is in fact largely an anthology of unrelated geographical sketches. For instance, after describing a journey from Peking to India, all of a sudden the ensuing passage begins from Peking anew and goes down the eastern Chinese seacoast. There is no illumination on how the traveler returned to Peking from India. Such incoherence permeates throughout the book. Thus, it falls short as a true travelogue, while at the same time also failing as a travel guide. Travelers could not follow his descriptions in attempted reenactments of his journeys beyond Persia.

Then there are the inaccuracies and improbabilities. For example, he described the Mongol capitol Karacorum, as a “very large castle.” He had Prester John (Wang Khan) living in the country of Gog and Magog, an undisguised extraction from the Bible. He even included the Isle of Man and Woman, borrowed directly from ancient Chinese mythology, as a real place,.

It is clear that, when viewed against the proper historical background, Marco Polo’s travel in the East was not unique. During the Mongol ascendancy many Europeans traveled to that part of the world privately or on official missions, and information about the mysterious East trickled into Europe. In 1246, Pian di Carpini, a Franciscan friar, was sent by Pope Innocent IV to check out the Mongols. William of Rubruck, another Franciscan friar, went in 1248. He reached Karacorum in 1254. Between 1320 and 1330 a third Franciscan monk, Odoric of Pordenone, visited China and India. In 1339 Pope Benedict XII dispatched the Franciscan monk Giovanni da Marignolli to China (Mongol Yuan Dynasty), and Giovanni da Montecorvino, who served as archbishop of Peking, died there in 1329. In 1340 a Florentine trader Pegolotti wrote a Pratica della Mercatura, a trader’s manual, purely basing on information extracted from conversations he had with merchants who did go to the East. There was no shortage of famous historical figures who went east. Letters that they brought back from the Mongol Khan are still preserved in the Vatican archives today. Yet there is no record of the Polos doing the same in Chinese, Persian, or European official annals. Further more, as mentioned above, for the twenty odd years the Polos were in the East, they never traded as claimed. They allegedly performed government functions just like these Franciscan monks did, except with no record of their deeds.

For all this, Marco Polo did not help his own cause. As promoted in his book, Marco Polo was especially gifted in his keen sense of the curious. It was written that the Great Khan had been disenchanted with his emissaries because they were unable to provide him with useful information on the customs and usages of the people of his vast domain. In response, Marco paid special attention to all details of novelties so as to court favor with the Khan. It therefore comes as a surprise that he never mentioned the curious Chinese habits of eating with chopsticks, women binding their feet, which was a fad during the recent Song time, Chinese eating a strange kind of food that we now call ice cream, and above all, having seen the Great Wall in his years in China. Nevertheless, he went further with his grandiose self-promotion. It was the Polos who furnished the Mongols with German and Nestorian engineers who constructed the siege engines that helped take Xiangyang, which ended in 1273. Remember that the Polos set off on their trip in 1270. Then Marco Polo governed Yangzhou for three years. At the end, the Polos were asked to accompany a Mongol princess on her journey of arranged marriage from China to Persia. When the princess arrived in Persia, the Mongol Ilkhan Arghun had died, so the princess married his son Ghazan instead. The story is a historical fact, minus the part of the Polos. Yet Marco Polo did not stop there. The entourage of the journey numbered some six hundred people. They made calls at Java, Ceylon, and India. By the time they reached their destination, five hundred and eighty two had perished, but Marco Polo, a land-based merchant with no seafaring skills, survived.

This sort of writing is a dead parallel to that of the late twentieth century popular Chinese martial arts novel Romance of The Vulture Slayer, in which the protagonist is a Chinese boy who grows up to be a martial arts master, befriends Genghis Khan’s youngest son, leads the Mongols in their western campaign, and is designated Genghis Khan’s son-in-law-to-be.

Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, not only are the Marco Polo aficionados unfazed by this total lack of historical justification, they grab on to it as a license to fill in the blanks with their fabulous imaginations, just like how people attempt to “reconstruct” Jesus’ missing years. With Marco Polo being Kublai Khan’s personal envoy with no specific duty tying him to a specific locale (except for three years in Yangzhou), he could thus be anywhere his supporters want him to be. None is more ludicrous than the assertion that Marco Polo visited the Americas and surveyed the continents. For evidence these zealots cite the so-called “Map with Ship.” This map is a part of the Rossi collection now housed at the Library of Congress. Not only has the map set yet to withstand the paleographic tests for concise dating, it clearly belongs to the worldwide group of maps created during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which came from Chinese navigation data as I demonstrated clearly (within the requirements of strict scientific evaluation) in my recent book The 1421 Heresy.

When taken in their aggregate, the points articulated above virtually confirm that Marco Polo did not likely make the trip to the Orient as advertised. However, the clinching evidence bolstering this conclusion is indeed embedded within Marco Polo’s writing itself.

For a person who purportedly traveled in China for seventeen years, Marco Polo used virtually exclusively Persian place names throughout the book, such as Gouza, Karazan, and Zaiton, which is Quanzhou, and Kinsai, which is Hangzhou. He called China Cathay, a Russo-Persian degradation of the name Khitan or Khitai, which was a kingdom distinct from China, which the Chinese called Liao. He used Manji, a derogatory nickname, as a place name for the South of China. He called the kingdom of Xixia the Province of Tanguth, which is the name of the ethnicity of the people of Xixia. The Merkits are called Merkriti, and Tibet Thebeth. There is a kingdom called Ta-in-fu, and a fortress called Tai-gin. There is also a place called Ach-baluch Manji. And he called Ogotai Khan Cyhn Khan. The Persian roots of his information cannot be denied.

Then for the cities of China there are many “fu,” such as Che-mein-fu for Kaiping, Pi-an-fu for Pingyang, Chan-ghian-fu for Xian, Tai-an-fu for Taiyuan, Sa-yan-fu for Xiangyang, Kue-lin-fu for Gueilin, and many others such as Ka-chan-fu, Ken-zan-fu, Sin-din-fu, Ta-pin-fu, and so on.

“Fu” is a legitimate Chinese designation for major cities, but not for Yuan Dynasty Mongols, who used the term “lu” instead. This is made clear in Yuan Shi, the official history of Yuan, in the Geography section:

Thus, the primary unit of geopolitical organization during Yuan time was the lu, as in Hangzhou Lu and Quanzhou Lu. Marco Polo’s Travel uses almost exclusively the fu, an unmistakable Ming Dynasty convention. This is clearly an anachronism, but, as it is, comes as no surprise. Recall that Ramusio’s version was based on a 1438 prototype, and it contains the additional section on the eastern Chinese seaboard. This was precisely when Zheng He’s navigational information was funneling into Europe after the abolition of the Ming maritime program, engendering the many new world maps of the time, most likely including those in the Rossi collection. (The above has been systematically laid out and analyzed in detail in my book The 1421 Heresy.) Therefore, we know this section of the work was added to the travelogue a hundred years after Marco Polo’s death. In other words, there are at least two major versions to his book; a later one containing extended coverage about China and East Asia, and an earlier one that extended no further than Persia in the Middle East. Clearly he did not write the later version; it was written a hundred years after his death.

As for the earlier version entailing the areas about Persia and the Middle East, the contents appear to agree entirely with the information found in the Persian historian Rashid al-Din’s (1248--1317) World History, a history of the Mongols, generally accepted as being written between1306-07. It is conceivable that somehow Marco Polo had gotten his hands on this material, or a manuscript of it. This is no empty speculation. As the Travel describes it, when Marco Polo arrived in Europe he was garbed in Mongol style attire, but in tatters. However, when the seams of his robe were opened, out came rubies and other precious gemstones. In other words he had no personal belongings with him. Yet, when dictating his eastern sojourns in jail, he asked for notes to be delivered from home for reference. These events are incongruent. The notes, however, suggest that he did have access to writings about his experiences, and that could very well be Rashid’s history.

When taken as a whole, the evidence clearly suggests that Marco Polo was a member of the Italian trade community stationed about the Black Sea at the time of the Golden Horde, and somehow obtained the history of the Mongols written in Persian. His information of the East was purely a Persian one. He has left us no maps, no map in his travelogue, and not one map of any other kind, and certainly no map of the Americas. Just like Sir John Mandeville’s travels, Marco Polo’s travels was most likely a work created to capitalize on the new fad that was in vogue at a time when new information about the East was fascinating Europe.

Why do we concern ourselves with the historicity of Marco Polo in a research about the Chinese circumnavigation and survey of the world? It is because scholars continue to utilize him to confuse the evidence that supports the Chinese navigation theory. Today these nay-sayers are still adhering to this untenable belief of a Middle Ages “superman” traveling all over the world drawing maps of all kinds. Indeed, any medieval map that contained suspicious contents these scholars explain them away by attributing the map to Marco Polo, who was free to do all sorts of things because we do not know where he went. The figure below illustrates the point.

In this 1546 Pierre Desceliers map unmistakably showing an out of proportion northwest Australia below Sumatra as presented in the book Landmarks of Mapmaking, instead of acknowledging the implausibility of European mapmakers having firsthand information (having navigated there and surveyed the landmass) about Australia barely fifty years after da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus reaching the Caribbean, and just twenty five years after Magellan circumnavigated the globe, the editors explained the map by saying that, “although not yet discovered at all,” based on the name Iava La Grande, or Greater Java, and some Portuguese names found on the map some scholars determined that the Portuguese discovered Australia in the early 1500, and because Iava La Grande was a name used by Marco Polo (remember that the portion of Polo’s travels about East Asia was put in writing in the sixteenth century), the mapmakers were probably influenced by Marco Polo.

Although there is no reason to believe, even suspect, that the book editors tried to pull a fast one over us; there is no reason to expect the editors to be experts in such arcane medieval geography and history, the wording in no uncertain terms glossed over any immediate need to pursue the matter further.

Not only was such geographical information available only after Marco Polo’s death, he was a land merchant. For his mere twenty some odd purported years in Asia, where did he find time to accomplish all that he was credited to have achieved (laying siege to a Chinese city among them) and learn to sail and navigate all over the places? Did he pilot ocean vessels all by himself when achieving these superhuman feats? After all, he could not possibly have worked with Chinese crews, as these experts have vouched for the impossibility of ancient Chinese to have sailed around the world. Marco Polo would have to have done it all alone, for otherwise how could he have made his companions to keep their mouths shut about the whole thing?

Ah, now I know why he dictated his travelogue to a hack writer while in prison. He was occupied constructing all those fabulous maps of his, and thus he had little time left to write. He had to either write or draw maps, and he chose to draw maps, which he could not delegate to someone without the requisite knowledge and experience. One can imagine the enormity of the task. Not only did he have to design the maps without external aid, he had to make sure that people who were in on the gig keep their lips sealed until a good two hundred years after his death before unleashing them onto the world when he knew the European explorers would be out in full.

The following is a compilation of maps designed to give a perspective on the development of medieval European world geography. The first map is a modern map of the world, placed here as reference. The first batch of maps was drawn from the start of the eleventh century to early fourteenth century, Marco Polo’s time. It can be plainly seen that European knowledge of the world during this early period was rather primitive. The second map series was drawn after the second half of the fourteenth century, spanning a period of about a hundred years after Marco Polo’s death. These maps show little improvement over their predecessors. Then the maps improved by a quantum leap, showing a startling gain in world acquaintance, as evinced by the third group of maps dating from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the era. European mapmakers had learned this from someone or somewhere. We know this because the great explorers had yet to reveal their talents.

Pre-Marco Polo

Post-Marco Polo

Post-Zheng He

First hand geographical knowledge is not readily acquired. It took the Portuguese almost a hundred years to reach the southern tip of Africa. It took them another hundred years to establish themselves firmly in the Indian Ocean, before venturing on to visit places such as China and Japan. Surveying a place requires even more time, because before one can survey a place, one needs to know enough of the place to explore it without dying from shipwreck due to hitting a reef, running aground, capsizing in turbulent waters, being blown away by storms, or suffering from any of the myriads of disasters awaiting the intrepid sailors. To attribute the medieval maps to the early Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, or English sailors is scholastically irresponsible. Yet those who evangelize such dime store histories are hardly hacks, armchair historians, or amateur investigators. Surprisingly, they turn out to be professionals who ply the history trade.

Marco Polo did not travel to China as advertised, nor did he draw any map. The medieval information about the world geography came from China, the bulk of which occurred right after Zheng He’s voyages, as established in the book The 1421 Heresy and the DVD documentary Pre-Columbian Chinese Exploration of the World.