Once upon a time, in the year 1254, a boy named Marco Polo was born in Venice.

Venice was a beautiful place to grow up. It had canals instead of roads, boats instead of buses, and merchants everywhere trying to sell you something.

Marco was the son of Niccolò Polo, a merchant, and the nephew of another merchant named Maffeo Polo. The two men had already travelled far beyond Europe, visiting places that most Venetians had never even heard of.

Marco, however, was still a boy.

He probably had no idea that one day people would talk about him for centuries.

At the time, he was probably more interested in ordinary things—food, games, getting into trouble, and avoiding being told to go to bed.

Then Marco's life changed.

His father and uncle decided to travel east again.

And this time, they were taking Marco with them.

"Pack your things," they told him.

"Where are we going?"

"Asia."

"How long will it take?"

"Quite a while."

That was something of an understatement.

The Polo family set off from Venice in 1271.

Today, if someone says, "We're going to China," you might check a flight, pack a suitcase, and complain about airport security.

Marco Polo had none of those options.

There were no airplanes.

There were no comfortable trains.

There was no GPS.

There wasn't even a decent roadside café every fifty miles.

The Polos travelled by ship, horse, camel, and on foot. They crossed mountains, deserts and dangerous roads. They passed through towns and kingdoms whose names were unfamiliar to them.

Marco was about seventeen years old.

Imagine being seventeen and your parents saying:

"We're going on holiday."

"Where?"

"China."

"How long?"

"Oh, several years."

"Can I bring my friends?"

"No."

Marco travelled with his father and uncle across the Middle East and Central Asia. They eventually reached the court of the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.

Kublai Khan was the grandson of the famous Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan.

He ruled an enormous empire.

And when Marco finally met him, something rather remarkable happened.

Kublai Khan seemed to like him.

Perhaps Marco was polite.

Perhaps he was curious.

Perhaps he simply knew how to tell a good story.

Whatever the reason, Marco stayed in the East for many years.

And he saw things that amazed him.

Marco described Kublai Khan's court as incredibly rich and impressive.

There were enormous palaces, beautiful gardens, huge numbers of soldiers and servants, and enough food to make Marco wonder whether the Mongols had secretly invented the "all-you-can-eat buffet."

The capital, Khanbaliq—roughly corresponding to modern Beijing—was a vast and bustling city.

To Marco, much of Asia must have seemed extraordinary.

He encountered paper money.

Now, paper money might sound ordinary to us, but to a medieval European it was astonishing.

Marco had grown up with coins made of metal.

Then he arrived in China and discovered that the government could basically say:

"This piece of paper is worth money."

And people agreed.

Marco must have thought:

"These people are either geniuses or completely mad."

They were, in fact, quite successful.

He also wrote about coal being used as fuel.

Europeans knew about coal, but Marco's descriptions helped introduce European readers to things that were unfamiliar to them.

He saw large cities, busy markets, elaborate roads and systems of government.

He travelled to many parts of the empire and, according to his later account, served the Great Khan in various roles.

Marco seems to have been an excellent observer.

He noticed details.

He asked questions.

And he remembered things.

He also had a talent for making everything sound just a little more astonishing.

If he saw a large city, it became enormous.

If he saw a great palace, it became magnificent.

If he saw something unusual, he made sure you knew about it.

Marco Polo was, in other words, a medieval travel writer.

And like many travel writers, he had discovered an important rule:

As Marco travelled, he heard stories about strange animals and distant lands.

He wrote about elephants, rhinoceroses, crocodiles and many other creatures.

He also reported things that sounded so extraordinary that some Europeans later wondered whether he had made parts of his journey up.

There is an old story that Marco Polo never mentioned the Great Wall of China.

That claim is often repeated, but historians are cautious about it. The Great Wall as we know it today was largely built or rebuilt centuries later, especially during the Ming dynasty.

So Marco's silence about it isn't necessarily evidence that he never went to China.

In fact, historians continue to debate exactly which parts of his account came from his own experiences and which came from other people he met.

Marco was a traveller, not a modern journalist.

He didn't carry a notebook with timestamps, photographs and a location app.

He listened to stories.

He remembered details.

And sometimes he probably heard something from someone who had heard it from someone else.

Imagine Marco writing:

"I saw a remarkable creature today."

Then someone tells him:

"Actually, there are even bigger ones twenty days away."

Marco:

"Excellent. I'll write that down."

And so the legend grew.

After many years in Asia, the Polos eventually decided it was time to return to Venice.

This was not because Marco had become bored with China.

They had a practical problem.

They wanted to go home.

But getting home was almost as difficult as getting there.

Eventually, the Polos joined a voyage by sea.

They travelled through Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean before reaching the Middle East and eventually Europe.

The journey was dangerous.

Ships could be wrecked.

Storms could appear without warning.

Disease was common.

Pirates were a problem.

And there were absolutely no complaints desks.

After years of travelling, Marco finally returned to Venice.

He had left as a teenager.

He came back as an experienced adult who had travelled farther than almost anyone he knew.

But there was a small problem.

People didn't necessarily believe him.

Marco began telling people about the incredible things he had seen.

He described enormous cities.

He talked about paper money.

He spoke of the wealth of the Mongol Empire.

He told stories about distant peoples, unfamiliar customs and strange animals.

Some listeners probably thought:

"Interesting."

Others may have thought:

"Marco, you've been away too long."

There is something amusing about this.

Imagine returning home after twenty-four years and saying:

"You wouldn't believe what I saw!"

And your neighbour replies:

"Of course I wouldn't."

Marco's adventures eventually became famous through a book commonly known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo.

The book was written with Rustichello of Pisa, whom Marco met while both were prisoners.

Yes, prisoners.

Because Marco's life somehow managed to become even more dramatic.

After returning to Venice, Marco became involved in a conflict between Venice and Genoa.

The Venetians and Genoese were rival maritime powers.

Marco was captured by the Genoese and imprisoned.

This sounds like the worst possible time to write a travel book.

But perhaps Marco had nothing better to do.

While in prison, he met Rustichello, a writer.

Marco told him about his travels.

Rustichello wrote them down.

And suddenly prison became something like a medieval writers' workshop.

Marco talked.

Rustichello wrote.

Together, they created a book that would become one of the most famous travel accounts in history.

The book introduced European readers to a world that seemed astonishingly large.

Marco described places that most Europeans had never seen.

He wrote about China, India, Persia and many other regions.

Some stories were accurate.

Some were probably based on information he received from others.

Some remain debated.

But the overall effect was enormous.

Marco Polo had given Europe a window into Asia.

Eventually Marco was released and returned to Venice.

He married, had three daughters and lived the rest of his life as a respected Venetian.

He never again made a journey quite like his great expedition to Asia.

Perhaps after travelling thousands of miles, he decided that Venice was far enough.

He died in 1324.

He was about seventy years old.

And his final years were probably rather more peaceful than his youth.

No desert crossings.

No mountain passes.

No Mongol emperors.

No pirate attacks.

Just Venice.

Boats.

Family.

And, presumably, plenty of stories.

This is where Marco Polo becomes particularly interesting.

For centuries, people argued about whether he had really travelled all the way to China.

Some doubted his stories.

Others believed him.

Modern historians generally regard Marco Polo as a genuine traveller whose account contains valuable information, while also recognizing that the book has problems and uncertainties.

He was not writing a modern historical record.

He was telling the story of a remarkable journey through a huge and complicated world.

And stories change as they travel.

Marco heard stories from merchants.

He collected information from officials and travellers.

He remembered places he had visited years earlier.

His book was copied and translated many times.

So it is impossible to treat every sentence as a perfectly accurate eyewitness report.

But that doesn't make the journey less remarkable.

If anything, it makes Marco more interesting.

He was curious enough to leave Venice, brave enough to cross enormous distances, and observant enough to return with stories that people still discuss more than seven hundred years later.

Marco Polo's greatest adventure was not simply travelling to China.

It was bringing news of a much larger world back home.

Before Marco, Europeans had limited knowledge of many parts of Asia.

After Marco, they had a collection of stories about vast cities, powerful rulers, unusual customs, exotic animals and unfamiliar technologies.

Whether every story was perfectly accurate mattered less than one important fact:

Marco had gone.

He had seen.

He had listened.

And he had told the story.

His journey also became part of a larger age of exploration.

Centuries later, other Europeans would read accounts of Asia and dream about travelling there themselves.

One famous reader was Christopher Columbus, who owned a copy of Marco Polo's book and made notes in it.

So Marco's stories helped inspire later generations of explorers.

Not bad for a Venetian teenager who probably thought he was simply going on a very long family trip.

And that may be the most amusing thing about Marco Polo.

Today, when someone says, "I'm going travelling for a few years," we might imagine backpacking, hostels and a lot of photographs.

Marco Polo's version involved deserts, empires, camels, storms, imprisonment and thousands of kilometres of travel.

And yet, after all that, he came home and did what travellers have always done.

He told everyone about it.

Only Marco had a slightly better excuse for saying:

"You really should have been there."