Seven hundred years ago, three men disembarked from a small galley onto the stone-paved dock of Venice. No one was expecting them, and their return to their homeland would have gone unnoticed if it weren't for the tattered robes they wore and the "indescribable Tartar smell in their appearance and speech." This describes Marco Polo's return to Italy after more than twenty years of absence.

But return from where exactly? Masterfully combining scientific discipline with an underlying humor, sinologist Frances Wood challenges the deeply rooted certainty that Marco Polo traveled to China and then dictated his travels to share firsthand experiences and knowledge with his contemporaries, using compelling arguments and sources. The popular imagination that places him among the pioneering explorers of the West (Columbus, Magellan, da Gama) has overlooked numerous inaccuracies, contradictions, inconsistencies, and omissions in the original text, reproducing them for centuries in millions of copies and variations as a genuine document of a marvelous European journey to the Far East.

Ultimately, did Marco Polo go to China? And did we read The Travels of Marco Polo?

From 1985 to 2017, Frances Wood published twelve notable studies in sinology, with the most heretical being the one at hand (1985). This is a thorough historical investigation into archives and sources, as well as a stylistic and factual "disassembly" of Marco Polo's Travels, which starts from the valid suspicion first expressed in 1966 by the distinguished German Mongolist Herbert Franke and revived by the eminent historian of Asian art at Oxford, Craig Clunas, that it recounts a true journey but is instead a collective collage of accounts from other travelers in the East.