# Marco Polo never mentions the Great Wall. Was he really in China?

*Marco Polo, 1271–1295*

His book describes money printed on paper, black stones that burn better than wood and couriers who bring news from a hundred days away in ten. It says nothing about tea, chopsticks or women's bound feet. Follow the route on the map, chapter by chapter, and see how historians settled whether he was there.

Marius Comper · 17 September 2026

## From Venice to Beijing and home by sea

Marco Polo's book is not a travel diary. A short prologue tells of the journey out and the return, and the rest describes the world region by region, in the order a traveller would meet them. The map follows that order as you read.

A solid line runs through places the book lists along one road, with the days of travel between them. A dashed line marks a stretch the book does not describe, so the route there is a guess. Distances are measured through those places, so the real journeys were longer.

## I. Venice, Acre, Layas

*1271 · carrying the pope's letters to Kublai Khan*

- In the book: Prologue, ch. IX–XIII
- On the map: 3,000 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: oil from the lamp at the Holy Sepulchre, which Kublai had asked for

Marco was 15 when his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo, came home to Venice in 1269 after nine years' travelling in Asia. They carried a letter from Kublai, Great Khan of the Mongols, to the pope: the khan asked for a hundred learned Christians and for oil from the lamp that burns at the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem.

The pope had died and the cardinals could not agree on a successor. After two years of waiting the brothers set out again, this time with Marco. They collected the oil in Jerusalem and had reached Layas, the port of Lesser Armenia, when they heard that the new pope, elected on 1 September 1271, was the legate they had spoken to at Acre. They went back to him.

Gregory X gave them two Dominican friars instead of a hundred scholars. The friars took fright at news that the Mamluk sultan was attacking Armenia and turned back. The three Polos went on alone.

The year of departure is not in the book. Historians work it out from the papal election and from the date the pope left Acre, in November or December 1271.

> “Finally he charged his Envoys to bring back to him some Oil of the Lamp which burns on the Sepulchre of our Lord at Jerusalem.” (Prologue, ch. VII)

## II. Through Persia to Hormuz

*1271 – 1275, the road to China · a detour the book does not explain*

- In the book: Book I, ch. III–XXVII
- On the map: 4,400 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: ships stitched with twine, without a single nail

The book does not say which way they crossed Persia. It describes in turn Greater Armenia, where a spring gives oil that is “good to burn”, then Tabriz, Yazd and the kingdom of Kerman, without saying the Polos went to each. The dashed line joins these places in the book's order.

From Kerman the description goes down to Hormuz, the port where merchants from India bring spices, pearls, silk and ivory. The ships there have no iron nails: the planks are stitched with twine made from coconut husk, and at sea “many of them are lost”.

Then the book returns to Kerman “by another road” and heads north-east, through the desert, to Balkh. Henry Yule, the book's English translator, supposed the Polos meant to go on by sea from Hormuz and gave up the idea. The book does not say why.

> “Their ships are wretched affairs, and many of them get lost; for they have no iron fastenings, and are only stitched together with twine made from the husk of the Indian nut.” (Book I, ch. XIX)

## III. Over the Pamirs

*1271 – 1275, the road to China · “the highest place in the world”*

- In the book: Book I, ch. XXIX–XXXIX
- On the map: 2,100 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: at altitude, fire does not cook food properly

In Badakhshan the book describes a mountain that yields rubies. Only the king may dig there, and he takes out few stones to keep their price high. The same country has lapis lazuli, “the finest in the world”.

Up the Wakhan valley you reach a plateau that “’tis said to be the highest place in the world”: twelve days' ride with no houses and no grass, so cold that no birds fly, where fire does not “cook food so effectually”. The observation is correct: at altitude, water boils at a lower temperature.

Wild sheep live on the plateau, with horns six palms long that shepherds make into bowls. Zoologists later named them after him; Yule already calls them *Ovis poli*.

From Kashgar the road runs along the southern edge of the Taklamakan, through Yarkand and Khotan, to the town of Lop. There travellers rest for a week and load up a month's supplies.

> “Because of this great cold, fire does not burn so brightly, nor give out so much heat as usual, nor does it cook food so effectually.” (Book I, ch. XXXII)

## IV. The Lop desert and Kublai's court

*1271 – 1275, the road to China · three and a half years from Acre to the khan*

- In the book: Prologue, ch. XIII–XIV; Book I, ch. XXXIX–LXI
- On the map: 2,600 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: the khan sent men 40 days' journey to meet them

The desert beyond Lop takes a month to cross. There is water about a day's ride apart, in 28 places. The book says that anyone who falls behind the caravan at night hears spirits calling his name and leading him astray, and that sometimes, even by day, drums can be heard.

In the city of Campichu, now Zhangye, Maffeo and Marco “dwelt a whole year” on a mission. The book does not say when.

The journey from Acre to the khan took “a good three years and a half”, because of bad weather and severe cold. Kublai was at his summer residence, Shangdu. Hearing they were coming, he sent people 40 days' journey to meet them. At court the khan noticed young Marco and asked who he was. “Sire, ’tis my son and your liegeman,” Niccolò answered.

If the three and a half years are right, Yule reckoned, they arrived around May 1275. That year is not in the book either.

> “Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveller ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party.” (Book I, ch. XXXIX)

## V. Cambaluc: paper money and burning stones

*1275 – 1291, in the khan's service · Kublai's capital, now Beijing*

- In the book: Book II, ch. XXIV–XXX
- On the map: 200 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: a post station with horses every 25 miles on every main road

Here the book describes three things Polo presents as marvels. The first is money. At the mint in Cambaluc they take the inner bark of the mulberry tree, make it into “something resembling sheets of paper, but black”, and cut it into pieces of different sizes by value. Nobody may refuse it, and anyone with a worn note can exchange it for a new one by paying three per cent. Ramusio's version adds the red seal printed on every note and the death penalty for forgers.

The second is the “black stones” dug from the mountains, which burn like wood and stay alight until morning. Nothing else is burnt throughout Cathay, Polo writes, although there is wood: the stones burn better and cost less. It was coal.

The third is the post. On the main roads there is a station with horses every 25 miles, and between them, every three miles, runners wearing belts hung with bells so they can be heard from far off. That is how news from a hundred days' journey away reaches the khan in ten days and nights.

The prologue says Marco learned “several languages, and four sundry written characters”. Yule believed Chinese was not one of them.

> “It is a fact that all over the country of Cathay there is a kind of black stones existing in beds in the mountains, which they dig out and burn like firewood.” (Book II, ch. XXX)

## VI. West, as far as Yunnan

*1275 – 1291, in the khan's service · a mission four months' journey away*

- In the book: Book II, ch. XXXV–XLIX
- On the map: 2,500 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: cakes of salt used as small change

The khan sent Marco on a mission to the western provinces, “a good four months’ journey” from the capital. Ten miles out of Cambaluc the book describes a marble bridge with 24 arches and columns carved with lions. The bridge exists, and is now called the Marco Polo Bridge, but the oldest Chinese descriptions give it 13 arches, and today it has 11.

Further on, in the province of Caindu, people have no coins. Gold is weighed, and for small change they use salt boiled and set in moulds of about half a pound: 80 pieces are worth one *saggio* of gold. In the province of Carajan, at Yachi, now Kunming, they pay with white shells from the sea: 80 shells are worth one weight of silver.

Details like these look minor, but they have weighed heavily in the argument about his journey. In 2013 the sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel gathered the evidence on Yuan currency and concluded that Polo is the only European, Arab or Persian observer of the time to say correctly that paper money did not circulate in Yunnan, where people paid with shells, salt, gold and silver. The Chinese sources that confirm it had not been translated, and Polo could not read Chinese.

> “They use for the purpose certain white porcelain shells that are found in the sea, such as are sometimes put on dogs’ collars; and 80 of these porcelain shells pass for a single weight of silver.” (Book II, ch. XLVIII)

## VII. Manzi: Yangzhou, Hangzhou, Zayton

*1275 – 1291, in the khan's service · the former Song empire, conquered by Kublai*

- In the book: Book II, ch. LX–LXXXII
- On the map: 1,900 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: “twelve thousand bridges of stone” in Hangzhou

On the road south, at Changlu, the book explains how salt is made: salty earth is soaked with water, and the water is boiled in iron cauldrons until it leaves a fine white salt. Vogel found the same method in Chinese documents of the Yuan period.

Of the city of Yangzhou the book says Marco “did govern this city for three full years”. One French manuscript says only that he “sojourned” there three years. Yule did not believe he was governor, and historians today see a lesser post, inflated when the book was written.

Also on the road south, the book claims the three Polos built the siege engines that forced the city of Xiangyang to surrender. The claim is false: according to the Chinese chronicles the city fell early in 1273, two years before they reached China.

Hangzhou, which Polo calls Kinsay, “The City of Heaven”, gets one of the longest descriptions in the book: a lake lined with palaces, stone towers where valuables are kept safe from fire, 12,000 bridges. But the book says where the biggest numbers come from: a document the Song queen sent to the general Bayan, which Marco says he later confirmed with his own eyes.

> “And there are in it twelve thousand bridges of stone, for the most part so lofty that a great fleet could pass beneath them.” (Book II, ch. LXXVI)

## VIII. Home by sea

*c. 1291 – 1295 · escorting a bride for the khan of Persia*

- In the book: Prologue, ch. XVII–XVIII; Book III
- On the map: 15,400 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: of some 600 people who embarked, the book says eight survived

Kublai did not want to let them go. The chance came when Arghun, the Mongol khan of Persia, asked for a bride from his dead wife's family. The khan chose Kokachin, a girl of 17, and Arghun's three envoys, Oulatai, Apusca and Coja, asked for the Venetians to come with them by sea.

The fleet sailed from the port of Zayton, now Quanzhou, in four-masted ships. After three months they reached Sumatra, where contrary winds held Marco for five months. There he describes “unicorns” that wallow in the mud, “not in the least like” those of European stories: they were rhinoceroses.

They sailed another 18 months across the Indian Ocean. The book says that of some 600 people who embarked, not counting the sailors, eight survived. Ramusio's Italian version says something else: that 600 died and that of the three envoys only Coja lived. Neither number can be checked.

Arghun had died in the meantime. Kokachin was given to his son Ghazan. The Polos set off for Trebizond, then by sea through Constantinople and Negropont, and reached Venice in 1295.

> “’Tis a passing ugly beast to look upon, and is not in the least like that which our stories tell of as being caught in the lap of a virgin.” (Book III, ch. IX)

## What the book leaves out

The list of Chinese things Polo never mentions was not drawn up by people who think he never went. Henry Yule drew it up, his translator and greatest defender in the 19th century: the Great Wall, tea, women's bound feet, fishing with cormorants, the printing of books and Chinese writing. Yule concluded that in China Polo lived mostly among foreigners.

In 1995 Frances Wood, curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library, used the same absences in her book *Did Marco Polo Go to China?* and argued that Polo probably got no further than the Black Sea and Constantinople. For each absence, specialists have proposed an explanation.

### The Great Wall

The stone and brick wall tourists visit was built or rebuilt by the Ming government, in the 16th and 17th centuries, three centuries after Polo. Before that there were ramparts of pounded earth, broken and moved from one dynasty to the next. In the great Chinese atlas *Guang yu tu*, printed in several editions, the wall appears only in that of 1579.

### Tea

In 13th-century China tea was drunk everywhere, and an Arab merchant had described it as early as the 9th century. But neither Odoric of Pordenone nor Ibn Battuta, who travelled in China after Polo, mention tea either.

### Bound feet

Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar in China in the 1320s, mentions them. Ibn Battuta does not. The custom belonged to a part of Chinese society that a foreigner in the Mongol entourage rarely saw.

### Chopsticks

Neither Polo, nor Odoric, nor Ibn Battuta mention them.

### Writing and printed books

Polo does not describe Chinese characters or the printing of books. He does describe paper money with a seal stamped on it, and the historian Igor de Rachewiltz points out that the seal was in fact a printing block.

### Fishing with cormorants

Odoric describes it, Ibn Battuta does not. Yule puts it on the same list of things that could have struck a Venetian.

## In the book or not?

Ten things a stranger could have seen in Kublai's China. Guess which are in Polo's book. The answers rest on the full text of Yule's translation.

1. **Paper money.** *In the book: made from the inner bark of the mulberry, compulsory to accept, with a 3% charge to exchange worn notes. Book II, ch. XXIV.*
2. **The Great Wall.** *Not in it. The stone wall known today was built under the Ming dynasty, after Polo's death.*
3. **Black stones that burn better than wood.** *In the book: coal, the only fuel burnt in Cathay, Polo writes. Book II, ch. XXX.*
4. **Tea.** *Not in it, although Polo passed through the tea districts of Fujian. Yule and Cordier call it a strange absence.*
5. **A unicorn that wallows in the mud.** *In the book, in Sumatra: “not in the least like” the unicorn of European stories. It was the rhinoceros. Book III, ch. IX.*
6. **Chopsticks.** *Not in it. Neither Odoric of Pordenone nor Ibn Battuta mention them either.*
7. **A marble bridge with 24 arches and carved lions.** *In the book, near Beijing. The bridge exists, but the oldest Chinese descriptions give it 13 arches. Book II, ch. XXXV.*
8. **Women's bound feet.** *Not in it. Odoric of Pordenone mentions them a few decades later.*
9. **Ships divided into watertight compartments.** *In the book, but only in the Italian version Ramusio printed in the 16th century. The old manuscripts lack the passage. Book III, ch. I.*
10. **Salt set in moulds and used as money.** *In the book, in the province of Caindu: 80 cakes of salt are worth one saggio of gold. Book II, ch. XLVII.*

## Did he go?

The doubts are old: most have been aired since the early 19th century. Here are the main charges, what specialists answered, and the evidence they regard as decisive.

- **His name appears in no Chinese source.** Nor do the names of other Europeans in Mongol China: Giovanni da Montecorvino, the first Catholic archbishop of Beijing, Odoric of Pordenone or Giovanni de' Marignolli. Of Marignolli's papal embassy in 1342, the Chinese annals record only the horse he brought as a gift.
- **He uses Persian and Mongol names, not Chinese ones.** Persian was the common language of foreigners in Mongol China. Yule had already noticed that Polo says Cambaluc, Zayton or Pulisanghin, the names used by the foreign merchants and officials he lived among.
- **He claims he helped capture the city of Xiangyang.** Here the account is false: the city fell before Polo arrived. The Chinese chronicles and the Persian historian Rashid al-Din credit the siege engines to Muslim engineers brought from the west. De Rachewiltz thinks the passage was added by Rustichello or a copyist, because it is missing from a group of manuscripts.
- **He says he governed Yangzhou.** One manuscript says only that he “sojourned” there three years. De Rachewiltz sees an exaggeration: a temporary post as an inspector or court envoy, inflated in the writing.

### What convinced the specialists

- **The three envoys.** In 1941 the Chinese historian Yang Zhijiu found, in a 15th-century encyclopedia, an administrative order of 1290 about supplies for three envoys sent to Arghun by sea: Ulutai, Abishqa and Khoja. They are Oulatai, Apusca and Coja in Polo's book, in the same order. The Persian historian Rashid al-Din records Khoja's arrival with the bride Kokachin. The Chinese document does not mention the mission's purpose, and Polo could not read Chinese. For Yang and for de Rachewiltz, the matching names are the proof that Polo had been there.
- **Money, salt and shells.** In *Marco Polo Was in China* (2013), Hans Ulrich Vogel compared what Polo says about currency, salt and revenue with Chinese sources and archaeology. No other European, Arab or Persian observer gives details as exact, and some of them appear in no one else; the sources that confirm them reached the West much later.
- **The golden tablets.** Kublai had given the Venetians golden tablets that entitled them to horses and escorts on the road. Maffeo Polo's will of 1310 mentions “three tablets of gold” from the Great Khan, and the inventory of Marco's goods made after his death lists “a large gold tablet of command”.

Those who work on the sources of Mongol China, from de Rachewiltz to Yang Zhijiu and Vogel, reach the same conclusion: Marco Polo went to China and lived there for many years. They also say that the book contains hearsay, inflated numbers and at least one demonstrably false episode.

## A book dictated in prison

In 1298 Marco was a prisoner in Genoa, in the war between Genoa and Venice. In prison he met a writer of chivalric romances, Rustichello of Pisa, who wrote down his story in French. Exactly which battle he was captured in is not known.

The book spread in handwritten copies and translations, many with additions or cuts. Yule counted some eighty manuscripts and built his translation from several versions, putting in square brackets the passages found only in the Italian version of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, prepared for printing in Venice in the 1550s.

Only Ramusio has, for example, Marco's year-long illness in Badakhshan, the watertight compartments of Chinese ships, the red seal printed on paper money and the army suffocated by the hot wind near Hormuz. They may be true memories of Marco's kept in Venice, or copyists' additions.

Marco Polo dictated his will on 9 January 1324, ill, naming his wife, Donata, and their three daughters as his trustees. Documents from June 1325 speak of him as some time dead.

## How far he went

Kilometres are measured on the map through the places the book names, so each is a minimum. The missions inside China are measured one way only.

| Stage | Kilometres on the map, at least | When |
| --- | ---: | --- |
| I. Venice, Acre, Layas | 3,000 | 1271 |
| II. Through Persia to Hormuz | 4,400 | 1271 – 1275, the road to China |
| III. Over the Pamirs | 2,100 | 1271 – 1275, the road to China |
| IV. The Lop desert and Kublai's court | 2,600 | 1271 – 1275, the road to China |
| V. Cambaluc: paper money and burning stones | 200 | 1275 – 1291, in the khan's service |
| VI. West, as far as Yunnan | 2,500 | 1275 – 1291, in the khan's service |
| VII. Manzi: Yangzhou, Hangzhou, Zayton | 1,900 | 1275 – 1291, in the khan's service |
| VIII. Home by sea | 15,400 | c. 1291 – 1295 |

From Venice to Shangdu the measured route is more than 12,000 kilometres. The voyage home by sea, via Sumatra and Hormuz, is more than 15,000.

## Sources and method

The chapters rest on Henry Yule's English translation, in the third edition revised by Henri Cordier (1903), which is in the public domain. The Romanian quotations are translated from Yule. The quiz answers rest on the full text of the book, without the editors' notes.

The route is drawn through the places the book lists along one road, on a Natural Earth map. Old names are identified from Yule's notes. Intermediate points at sea or in passes keep the line on water or along a valley and say nothing about where the Venetians passed. Distances are measured over the Earth's surface and rounded down to the hundred kilometres.

### The book

- [Marco Polo, *The Travels of Marco Polo*, tr. Henry Yule, 3rd edition revised by Henri Cordier (1903), vol. 1 (Project Gutenberg)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10636)
- [Ditto, vol. 2 (Project Gutenberg)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12410)

### Did he go to China?

- [Igor de Rachewiltz, “F. Wood's *Did Marco Polo Go To China?* A Critical Appraisal”, Australian National University (summary of “Marco Polo Went to China”, *Zentralasiatische Studien* 27, 1997)](https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41883/1/Marcopolo.html)
- [Hans Ulrich Vogel, *Marco Polo Was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues*, Brill, 2013](https://brill.com/display/title/21884)
- [University of Tübingen, “Marco Polo was not a swindler: He really did go to China”, ScienceDaily, 17 April 2012](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120416100439.htm)
- [Frances Wood, *Did Marco Polo Go to China?*, Secker & Warburg, 1995](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Marco_Polo_Go_to_China%3F)

### The map

- [Natural Earth, 1:50m countries, lakes, rivers and geographic regions (public domain)](https://www.naturalearthdata.com/)

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A project by [Marius Comper](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/) · https://mariuscomper.uk/marco-polo/en/