By Jiminov
I recently saw a news article that stated that a scholar had completed a statistical analysis of the vocabulary used by Marco Polo and concluded that the furthest East he had probably traveled was Persia. This conclusion was apparently due to the fact that the Persian words outnumbered the Chinese by a substantial margin. Furthermore, Marco never mentioned anything like the Great Wall or the practice of footbinding (which was supposed to be very common then). I'll see if I can find a link to the article and post it if anyone is interested.
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Jiminov, the Great Wall back then was a decaying mud wall. The current Great Wall you're thinking about was built by the Ming Dynasty, some 200 years or something. And as for footbinding, Marco presumably mixed with Mongol nobles (due to Kublai's distrust of Chinese nobles), who did not practice the art of footbinding, common amongst peasants. Now Marco is not going to deal with dirty little peasants in fields, is he?
