Il Milione: taking apart the theory that the famous Venetian traveler never actually reached the Middle Kingdom.
A note for impatient readers: this article first lays out the accusations leveled against Marco Polo by his critics, then works to show the inconsistency of these doubts. The evidence for his journey to China turns out, at the very least, to be probable.
Frances Wood, director of the Chinese Department at the British Library, published “Did Marco Polo Go to China?” in 1995, a book that stirred considerable controversy by contradicting the long-standing tradition that Marco Polo had truly reached the Far East. According to the British writer’s thesis, the famous Venetian traveler never went further than the Black Sea, where his family conducted its merchant business.
“Description of the World,” the name by which “Il Milione” was originally known, the book he supposedly dictated to Rustichello of Pisa, his fellow prisoner in the Genoese jails of 1298 to 1299, would be nothing more than a copy of other travelers’ chronicles. The doubt arises because Marco Polo, among other contradictions in his book, failed to address certain matters that, in the author’s view, could not possibly have gone unmentioned: the Great Wall, the tea drinking tradition, the use of chopsticks, not to mention the complete absence of the Italian traveler from official Chinese archives of the period.
In truth, the idea that Marco Polo never actually reached China was not entirely new, and had circulated for some time in various academic and non academic circles. As early as the nineteenth century, for instance, some historians doubted the authenticity of his story. In 1996 the Journal Star published an article questioning the 24 year journey undertaken by Mr. Polo, likely drawing on Wood’s book. David Selbourne, an English historian, had instead attributed the first Western chronicle of a journey to the Orient to the traveler Giacobbe d’Ancona, whose diary was said to have been kept hidden by private owners.
For Dr. Wood, “Il Milione” remains a splendid story; the problem, however, is that there is no evidence to support it. Like other great legends, it is simply a myth. The author goes even further, accusing the majority of historians of passively accepting the tradition. A true historian, according to the British author, should always critically analyze the facts, separating what is irrefutably demonstrable from what is not.
The Doubts of the Prosecution
The book, like other revisionist texts, predictably achieved great success and brought considerable fame to its fortunate author.
The main points on which Wood’s thesis and Polo’s detractors rest are the following:
- The Venetian merchant’s journey is geographically incoherent, both in terms of itinerary and chronology.
- The place names are not those used in Chinese or Mongolian, as one would expect, but are in Persian, which would confirm a theory of the German sinologist H. Franke, according to which Polo used Persian sources to compose his text.
- Polo incorrectly describes some important places, such as the famous Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing, which according to him would have 24 arches instead of 11 or 13.
- He fails to address certain descriptions of well known Chinese customs, such as the Chinese writing system, books and printing, tea, porcelain, the use of chopsticks, and cormorant fishing.
- Marco Polo ignores the existence of the Great Wall.
- Marco Polo states that his father Nicolò and his uncle Maffeo were present at the Mongol siege of Xiangyang, the important Song stronghold in Hubei. But this episode would appear to be false, since the siege took place in 1273, and the Polo clan reached China only a year later.
- The Venetian traveler claims to have been governor of Yangzhou in Jiangsu for three years, but his name does not appear in the official archives of the region.
- No member of the Polo family, despite the importance they claimed for themselves, is ever mentioned in the official chronicles of the period.
Marco Polo Did Really Go to China
Frances Wood, adding to these blatant contradictions already raised in the past, argues that Polo’s text is not written like a genuine travel diary, but rather like a merchant’s guide, comparable to Pogolotti’s “Pratica della Mercatura.” Some accounts, such as the one describing Marco’s return to the West accompanied by the Mongol princess Kökechin all the way to Persia to marry Il-khan Arghun, may have been borrowed from other narratives. Rustichello of Pisa’s role as editor of the chronicles is ambiguous. It is difficult to distinguish Rustichello’s contributions from Polo’s own. What is certain, however, is that Marco Polo did not introduce spaghetti and ice cream to Italy, since he was never in China; how could he have?
Finally, Wood suggests the possibility that his father and uncle might have made the dangerous journey to the Mongol court themselves, given that they possessed the golden tablet perhaps handed to them by Kublai Khan himself, and that Marco may have usurped their role, rather meanly attributing to himself glory that belonged to others. Wood’s final conclusion is that Marco Polo obtained the information to compile “Il Milione” partly from his family’s accounts, and partly from other travelers he met in Crimea and Constantinople, with the help of Persian guides and maps.
But these fascinating doubts, many of which had already circulated in earlier forms since the nineteenth century, have been extensively criticized, refuted and dismantled by generations of historians, both Chinese and of other nationalities, including Fang Hao (方豪) and Yang Zhijiu (杨志玖), who based their arguments not on the omissions (Marco Polo was not, after all, writing a Lonely Planet guide to China), but on his detailed descriptions of the places he visited, and on other evidence.
In 1997, Igor de Rachewiltz, a respected professor of Polish origin based in Rome, analyzed and dismantled the revisionist theses point by point in his article “Marco Polo Went to China,” published in Zentralasiatische Studien 27.
Marco Polo was not a professional writer; he was a merchant. His writing skills were limited, and he very often relied on the standard formulas of merchant literature. He left Venice at just seventeen years old, and spent most of his life abroad. He was an attentive observer, but lacked imagination.
Personal reflections never emerge in the text, and are confined exclusively to the Prologue of the book, which, as the scholar rightly points out, is called “Description of the World,” not a travel diary. The descriptions are what matter, and his personal involvement is purely incidental. The result is that the main events and names are generally correct, but not the details. It must be remembered that the book was compiled many years after his return; Marco was elderly, and could easily have confused things, no longer able to verify his own accounts. Moreover, Marco Polo almost certainly exaggerated his own role, padding certain episodes with invented details. One must also take into account the era in which the book was written, a time when narrators lingered over the marvelous details of their chronicles.
Had Marco truly had access to Persian chronicles, he would not have made errors such as the description of the Beijing bridge or the exact location of certain Chinese cities, errors far more plausibly explained by faded memory. Nor is Marco’s book a merchant’s guide, even though it contains continuous references to that trade and its language bears its influence. The style is confused but not contradictory, and this is due precisely to Polo’s stylistic limitations, not to any lack of coherence.
Igor de Rachewiltz points out that during his long stay in China, Marco Polo never mixed with the Chinese, never learned Chinese, and had no interest in their ancient culture. He moved instead among communities of foreigners, somewhat like a good portion of Italian travelers and students in China do today, communities already present even before the Mongol invasion. There was a large number of Persian and Turkic speaking merchants able to speak Caucasian languages and Arabic, as well as other travelers from various Western countries, particularly Italy, who conducted trade with the maritime republics.
The role that English plays today was, in that era, played by Persian, which was not only widely used by foreign travelers, but was also the most commonly used official foreign language among the Chinese themselves, as demonstrated by the University of Hangzhou through the studies of Huang Shiqian (黄时鉴). Chinese was the language of the ruled, and Mongolian, to a lesser degree Turkic, that of the rulers. A gulf separated these two classes. Relations between foreigners and the Chinese were purely economic or administrative in nature, so these kinds of dealings took place using the Persian lingua franca, which fully justifies Polo’s use of Turkic and Persian names. Furthermore, many of the incorrect names are the result of faded memory, since, as noted above, the book was written many years later, in a prison, no less.
This exchange along the Eurasian trade routes was, in any case, nothing new by Polo’s time. Arab, Persian, and Chinese merchants had used these same corridors since antiquity, and contact between the Roman world and China is attested as early as the third century, as documented in A Third Century Chinese Account of the Roman Empire. The Roman merchant Maes Titianus is credited with one of the earliest recorded journeys along this route toward China, an episode explored in Maes Titianus: A Roman Merchant’s Tale on the Silk Road. Marco Polo’s journey, then, followed a route with more than a thousand years of prior traffic behind it, rather than opening one from scratch.
The gaps in his descriptions of Chinese customs should instead be interpreted as significant omissions, ones that are, after all, common to other travelers such as Ibn Battuta and Odorico di Pordenone. Marco does in fact mention the printing process, though without naming it as such, describing it as “sealed.” This is clearly a limitation of his cultural background, and it falls to the reader to interpret his descriptions. These details, however, would very likely have interested travelers more culturally sophisticated than Odorico or Marco. It should not be forgotten that, at the time, the majority of the population was illiterate.
The custom of drinking tea, widespread especially among the Chinese, was too trivial a detail to impress Marco. Nor did other travelers of the period mention this custom, nor the use of chopsticks, nor the tradition of foot binding. As for porcelain, Marco Polo in fact mentions it as many as four times, which shows that Frances Wood read his book rather superficially. It should also be remembered that Marco Polo did not associate with the Chinese, and so had little particular interest in their customs and habits, however curious or important they might appear to us, viewed through the eyes of twenty first century Westerners. Cormorant fishing is entirely omitted by both Marco and Ibn Battuta, though not by Odorico.
As for the omission of the Great Wall, some simple historical considerations are in order: the glorious feat of engineering as we know it today was not yet in its complete form, but rather a non uniform collection of wall sections built in different periods, and it was fortified and completed by the Ming dynasty, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. What is more, recent studies have shown that the materials used at the time went no further than packed earth and mud reinforced with wooden posts. It is unlikely that such a structure would have impressed Marco Polo.
The only clearly established legend, on the other hand, is the one describing the wall as a continuous structure dating back to the first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. There is no trace of this architectural marvel in official Chinese archives before the thirteenth century either, though that does not mean it did not exist. As for the absurd episode of the siege of Xiangyang, there are only two possibilities: vainglory on Marco’s part, or a later addition by Rustichello in a subsequent edition, meant to lend credit to the Polo family. What is certain, however, is that the episode claiming Marco Polo served as governor of Yangzhou is an exaggeration.
According to Igor de Rachewiltz, there is no reason to doubt that he lived in the city for a certain period, since Yangzhou was an important economic center, and an Italian community of merchants settled there between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But Marco was certainly not its governor, though he very probably held some sort of official role. This invention can be attributed to Rustichello himself.
It is true that the Polos do not appear in official Chinese archives, but in any case we do not know his Chinese name, assuming he had one, nor his Mongolian one, despite Marco’s claim that he was always known as “Master Marco Polo.” In any case, the Mongols had the custom of giving nicknames to members of their entourage, names that could have been transcribed into Chinese.
This, of course, remains only a hypothesis, since his nickname has never been traced in the chronicles. Far more likely, Marco Polo, like a great many other foreign travelers of the period, is simply ignored entirely by the archives. Not even Giovanni di Montecorvino, the first Catholic archbishop of Beijing and a contemporary of Marco, is mentioned, nor is the friar Odorico da Pordenone, nor Giovanni di Marignolli, the head of an important papal embassy.
Many other objections raised by Frances Wood stem from misreadings of Polo’s text.
As for the story that Marco Polo brought spaghetti and ice cream back to Europe, this is a nineteenth century legend that neither Polo’s own text nor serious scholarship on either side of the debate actually supports. Frances Wood herself devotes a full chapter of her book to dismantling the claim, noting that ice cream had already been known in China since the Tang dynasty, centuries before Polo, and that it was Arab traders, not Polo, who first brought it to Europe in the thirteenth century. This last detail, however, deserves its own caveat: most food historians today doubt that European ices descend from the Chinese court dessert at all. The more likely line of transmission runs through Persian faloodeh and Arab sherbet, chilled fruit and syrup drinks that reached Europe through Sicily and the Mediterranean, entirely independent of any contact with China. The idea of a Chinese origin for European ice cream appears to be, itself, a nineteenth century invention, one that gave a fashionable Oriental pedigree to a dessert that in fact arrived via the Arab world. As for spaghetti, part of the confusion stems from a translation issue, since in some English editions the term “lasagne” used by Marco was rendered as “vermicelli” or “spaghetti.” What Marco actually described as lasagne was, in any case, nothing more than a variant of pasta already widespread across Asia and Europe, in different forms, well before his journey. On this particular point, then, Wood and her critics are largely in agreement.
Finally, Frances Wood scores other striking own goals by citing the story of the return journey with princess Kökechin and the mystery surrounding the golden Mongol seals entrusted to the Polos by the Great Khan himself, meant to be delivered to the Pope and to other important European monarchs. The nature of the princess’s journey was personal and highly delicate, an internal matter of the Mongol royal family. There is no trace of this princess in the archives of the Yuan dynasty. But some correspondence shows that negotiations were indeed carried forward for an embassy led by three diplomats to Persia.
These documents show that the dates and places match those reported by Polo, even though neither the princess nor Polo himself is ever mentioned. The discovery was made in 1941 by the Chinese scholar Yang Chih-chiu (杨志玖). Furthermore, the Persian historian Rashid al-Din, writing just a few years after these events, mentions this embassy led by Khoja, named by Polo himself several times in his accounts, upon his arrival in Abhar, and also mentions a Mongol bride among the travelers. It would have been impossible for Polo to have known these details, since the first written Persian account of this episode dates to 1311.
But there is more. Some accounts point to a conversation Marco Polo reportedly had in 1303 with the physician and astrologer Pietro D’Abano (1250 to 1316), in which Marco is said to have made astronomical observations, illustrating them with sketches. There is no trace of this conversation in Il Milione, though it appears in the “Conciliator Differentiarum,” attributed to the Venetian scientist. According to a later analysis of this text, Marco Polo would have needed direct experience of Sumatra and the South China Sea to have known these details, information otherwise unknown to Western scholars at the time. If accurate, this would stand as further evidence of his journey, though this particular episode rests on a single secondary source and has not been as widely corroborated as the currency and place name evidence discussed elsewhere.
Therefore, in the final analysis, Frances Wood’s theses appear fragile and made in bad faith, owing more to an inability to interpret a text written more than seven hundred years ago than to a genuine desire to shed light on an important document.
New Evidence Since De Rachewiltz: Hans Ulrich Vogel’s Research
The most significant scholarly contribution to appear after Igor de Rachewiltz‘s 1997 article is the work of Hans Ulrich Vogel, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Tübingen. In his book “Marco Polo Was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues,” published by Brill in 2012, Vogel carried out an item by item comparison of the currencies, salt production, and revenues described in the Travels of Marco Polo, drawing on official and private Chinese sources as well as other travel writings from the period. His book also offers a systematic review of thirteen major topics in the debate, covering everything from the authorship of the text to the Persian rendering of Chinese place names.
The verdict reached by the scholars who reviewed the work is unambiguous: despite a few well known problems in Marco Polo’s writings, his account is supported by an overwhelming number of verified details about China, details corroborated across Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French, German, and Spanish sources spanning centuries. Vogel’s research effectively confirms, with far more systematic documentary support, the position already argued by de Rachewiltz in 1997.
The 700th Anniversary of Marco Polo’s Death (2024)
The year 2024 marked seven hundred years since Marco Polo’s death in 1324, and this anniversary produced new documentary initiatives. The State Archive of Venice, the National Library of Saint Mark, and the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts have been curating a diplomatic codex gathering documents relevant to the study of Marco Polo as a historical figure, to be published both as a book and online through the Engineering Historical Memory initiative. Venice also hosted exhibitions marking the occasion, including a display of a fifteenth century German language book on Marco Polo shown in April 2024.
Where Scholarly Consensus Stands Today
Interviewed on the subject in more recent years, the Chinese scholar Rong Xinjiang (荣新江) of Peking University, one of the leading specialists working to restore Marco Polo to the center of sinological studies, has confirmed that the majority position within academia remains that Marco Polo did in fact travel to China. At the same time, he acknowledges that conclusive evidence for Polo’s claimed official post under the Yuan dynasty has still not been found, a weak point already flagged in the article above. Recent scholarship largely converges on the same middle ground already staked out by de Rachewiltz: it is plausible that Marco Polo did serve in some capacity within the imperial salt monopoly at Yangzhou, but not as governor.
Outside strictly academic circles, one of the most sustained attempts to test Polo’s account against the physical world came from Michael Yamashita, a National Geographic photographer who spent three years retracing Polo’s entire route for the magazine, from Venice through Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, along the Silk Road into China, and back via Sumatra and India. His photographs and the resulting book, “Marco Polo: A Photographer’s Journey,” do not settle the scholarly debate, but they document a landscape, and in many cases specific sites mentioned in Il Milione, that still line up with Polo’s centuries-old descriptions.
It is also worth being precise about where the debate actually stands today. The question of whether Marco Polo went to China at all is, for most practical purposes, no longer a live controversy: the historian Peter Jackson has written that later work on the subject should be considered to have settled the matter. What remains genuinely open is narrower and more specific: how much of an official role, if any, Polo held in Yangzhou, how far he inflated his own importance at the Mongol court, and how much of the final text reflects Rustichello’s hand rather than Polo’s own account.
Topics: Marco Polo China account, Il Milione authenticity, Frances Wood theory, Marco Polo governor Yangzhou, Marco Polo Great Wall, Yuan dynasty foreign travelers, Marco Polo Persian sources, Hans Ulrich Vogel Marco Polo
Note: Article originally published in Cina Magazine (2008), CinaOggi (Marco Polo è andato veramente in Cina), and updated in 2026
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