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The author succeeds in all of these respects. Anticipation and excitement grow when you encounter the book, hoping it will reveal new data, provide new lenses and offer new methodological approaches to historical inquiry that may inform the authenticity of Marco Polo’s book. His book Marco Polo was in China was published last year as part of the Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900 series. Hans Ulrich Vogel is an established sinologist, writing on various aspects of Chinese history. Wood does not believe that Marco Polo was a merchant, instead attributing his interest in paper money to curiosity. (4) Although Marco Polo claimed he was intimate with the Khan, Wood stresses that he was not mentioned in any official Chinese documents.

Neither did Marco Polo mention the Great Wall. She claims the Travels is not a ‘logical itinerary’ and completely fails to ‘pick up a few Chinese or Mongol place-names’. (3) Wood points out various inconsistencies in the travel narrative and the omission of important characters under the Khan’s reign. (2) Frances Wood renewed the question in 1996 with the publication of Did Marco Polo go to China?, arguing that Marco Polo ‘probably never travelled much further than the family’s trading posts on the Black Sea and in Constantinople’. Based on his research, American scholar John W Haeger posed the question ‘Was Marco Polo in China?’ in 1979, expressing his view that the Venetian only reached Beijing. Hullmann, Herbert Franke, Craig Clunas and Frances Wood have all written about this question. The Travels of Marco Polo again came under suspicion of fraud in the 20th century, when certain flaws, mistakes and proud boasts that do not tally with the facts prompted scholars to ask whether Marco Polo had really been to China. Thus, it was difficult for Westerners to accept such a sharp contrast between the friars’ accounts and Marco Polo’s description of the East in the same century. Friars John of Pian Carpini and William of Rubruck portrayed the Mongols as ‘barbarians’ who seemed to be members of ‘some other world’, and this perception had taken root in Europe. (1) Marco Polo’s description of the Far East met with such scepticism in large part because it differed so widely from the accounts of travellers in the first half of the century. As John Larner notes, ‘the real difficulty for the Western reader was in believing in the revelation of a wholly new world of towns and cities’. At the time the book came out, the general verdict was that the contents seemed ‘incredible’. Many people throughout the Middle Ages viewed the book as a romance or fable, while in recent years some scholars have deemed the book to be fraudulent.

Despite its popularity, not everyone believed Marco Polo’s account.

The transmission and translation of the original Rustichello-Marco text (either in French or Franco-Italian) resulted in 150 medieval manuscripts. Since its publication in the 13th century, the Travels of Marco Polo has attracted a wide readership around the world.