HE is credited with bringing pasta and ice cream to the West, he told wonderful tales of strange cities, sea monsters and islands populated by women.
Popular history has it that Marco Polo was the first Westerner to travel to China and chronicle events there. But was he instead one of the first literary confidence tricksters? Did he instead travel no further east than Constantinople, the Istanbul of today? The curator of the Chinese section of the British Library, Dr Frances Wood, has just completed a book which she believes disproves that he ever got there. It is due out next year, ironically the 700th anniversary of his alleged return from China to Venice in 1295.
Dr Wood herself is certainly no quick-buck fiction writer. Indeed she has done as much travelling around China as Marco Polo would ever claim. She gained a degree in Chinese at Cambridge, earned a PhD in London and then studied in Beijing in the last year of the Cultural Revolution in 1975-76, packed off to the fields and the factories helping with the rice harvest and watching others make diesel engines.
But she has been at the Chinese section of the British Library in London studying Chinese books for the last 15 years. Dr Wood first postulated that Marco Polo may not have got to China in an article in The Times in 1982. It caused a storm at the time.
Now she has taken her studies further and believes most of the evidence points to Polo never having got there. If he had he would certainly have mentioned bound feet on women, tea drinking, and even the Great Wall itself, which he would certainly have had to pass through or over even though it was then an earthen mound rather than the stone-faced structure built up by the later Ming dynasty. But there's not a mention of all this in Marco Polo's modestly entitled A Description of the World.
So who was Marco Polo? He was a member of a Venetian merchant family with trading houses in Constantinople and at Sudak on the Crimea. We know they traded into Western Asia possibly in fur, salt and even slaves.
In the first section of the book he describes a first journey by his father Nicolo and uncle Maffeo to the Far East. He next chronicles another trip he claims to have made with them, staying in China for 17 years. He was 17 when he left Venice and claims that the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan became his mentor, and used him as an envoy across his empire into China and India.