Did Marco Polo go to China? Book

A fun easily comprehensible book that queries the veracity of Marco Polo's "Description of the World." Wood writes with wit and with a deep knowledge of China. Many reviewers have nitpicked this book for "getting it wrong" and suggested that Wood lacks the necessary knowledge to write such a book. Though I have no deep knowledge of the materials, it seems odd to me how angry the reaction against the text is, but as Wood points out, it is unpopular to go against a powerful and deeply entrenched myth.

The crux of the argument is twofold: 1) that many of the most memorable and fantastical bits of Polo's stories only emerge in 16th century editions, and that no "original" copies exist (only copies of early copies, which in addition to suffering copying errors are being translated to other languages). This makes it hard to isolate Polo's voice from the embellishments of later copyists and publishers trying to sell a good story to their audiences; 2) that Polo leaves out many obvious aspects of Chinese geography and society that would later have a magnetic effect on the Eurasian imagination: the Great Wall, tea, foot binding, chopsticks, etc. This is odd because Polo was allegedly there for seventeen years. Even if Marco had been camping in Mongolian ger, it would have been hard to avoid tea and Chinese writing.

At this point it is important to note that the title of the book is "Did Marco Polo go to China?" not "Did Marco Polo actually go anywhere in Asia?" It could be said that Polo spent much time in Mongolian lands in Central and Inner Asia, but Wood argues that his silence about important and enduring elements of Chinese culture is suspect, as are his frequent errors about the cities he claims to have visited, or even, possibly, been governing. There is a complementary silence in the Mongolian and Chinese sources about the role of any Polos, Italians, or even "Franks" in any of the positions and place where Marco claimed to have been. Wood ultimately thinks that Marco Polo probably never left the Black Sea, and that the Description is compiled from Persian guidebooks, Polo family knowledge, and other accounts from travelers who were moving around Eurasia at the time.

The skepticism seems reasonable to me, and I certainly will look at Polo's writings with a more critical eye, as a more measured Mandeville, giving distorted and embellished information rather than conveying fantasy for entertainment's sake. Polo gets a lot wrong, but the writings contained in the book are a fascinating source of early European knowledge about China that the Mongolian Empire's cosmopolitan character made available. The vast amount of scholarship about what Polo may or may not have seen has revealed the vast network of linguistic and geographic interaction that makes his story so hard to verify.