Did Marco Polo go to China, or did he make it all up?

“Like others who have examined his writings closely, I am dismayed by his omissions and floored by his whoppers. But I am ultimately convinced of his essential truthfulness. Why? For one thing, his itineraries, as laid out by the sequence of book chapters, are fundamentally accurate, whether he’s crossing Central Asia or central China. Where did he acquire that geographical information if he didn’t make these journeys himself? No skeptical investigator has ever proved that he copied from some Arab or Chinese source. And while it’s true that Polo is guilty of curious omissions (those chopsticks, for example), he expanded medieval Europe’s meager knowledge of Asia with such hitherto-unknown names as Cipangu, Java, Zanzibar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), besides identifying China’s great cities and describing such features as the Takla Makan Desert and the Yangtze River. Having followed Polo’s tracks, I know firsthand that he also got many things right, such as: both lapis lazuli and rubies are found in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan; in China’s southwest a minority people eat raw flesh; people in Sumatra and Sri Lanka make a joy juice from fermented palm tree sap.”