332 Polo, Marco Marco Polo sets out from Venice for the Far East with his father and an uncle In the foreground are depictions of the lands they will visit An illustration reproduced from a 14th-century manuscript In some ways the book written by Polo with Rustichello is not as informative as another well-known book by a medieval traveler, Ibn Batuta It is a frustratingly impersonal book Despite the title Travels of Marco Polo, it offers few details about the routes by which Polo traveled to China and back to Europe, or the dangers and discomforts that he experienced Probably the claim that each of the journeys took several years is a literary device to emphasize how distant China was from Europe If someone traveled continuously, such a journey probably took about nine months In the book there is a bit of ethnography (for instance, religions practiced) and economics (such as the use of paper money), but most of its pages comprise a geographical map of China, especially its rich cities Europeans learned from Polo that, compared with their own societies, China was an enormous country, much more wealthy and much more advanced in methods of technology, government, and warfare Although inaccurate in what he said about Japan, Polo was the first European to mention the existence of the island country Scholars have sometimes doubted that Polo traveled farther east than Persia, where he could have obtained secondhand news about China He ignored topics that modern readers would expect, such as the Great Wall of China, foot binding, tea drinking, and the Chinese method of writing Although he claimed to have been a great favorite of the emperor, Chinese governmental records say nothing about him Polo provided Per-