In his book, Marco Polo, an Italian merchant claimed to have traveled through China and met the Mongol ruler of China, Kublai Khan during the thirteenth century. However, many historians suggest that Polo's accounts of his travels in China were fabricated with the help of Arab and Persian merchants who had visited China, and that Polo never set foot in China. There are several reasons why the credibility of Marco Polo's accounts of his travels to China in the thirteenth century has been called into question.

In his book Polo claimed that he was a trusted advisor to Kublai Khan, participating in military actions and even serving as a governor for three years. However, there is no mention of Polo in any Chinese records. This is highly unusual because the Chinese were meticulous record keepers and one would assume that if Polo was so politically well connected there should be some written record about him,

It is extremely puzzling that Polo never mentioned tea, which was popular in China. The Chinese were the first culture to cultivate tea plants and develop the custom of drinking tea.

Chinese records indicate that the use of tea dates as far back as the first millennium B.C. Tea drinking was widespread as a beverage that was consumed for pleasure on social occasions during the period that Polo was traveling around China and writing his journals. Given the uniqueness of this custom, it seems that this would have been of great interest to Polo if he had actually been to China.

Throughout Polo's accounts of China, he paid great attention to and reported in great detail about the architecture of the buildings he saw in China. However, not even once did Polo mention perhaps the most famous structure in China, the Great Wall. The Great Wall, a massive defensive structure, was built many decades before Polo supposedly traveled to China. It was built to prevent the Mongol people, who ruled China during the period that Polo claimed to have been in China, from conquering China. If Polo truly spent several years exploring China, we would definitely expect that there would be some reference to the Great Wall in his journals.