ABSTRACT
Paul Pelliot's complex work on the language raised many doubts as to Marco Polo's accuracy as well as the foundation for his information, but Professor Pelliot, though frequently baffled, always left Marco Polo with the benefit of the doubt. In the popular imagination, Marco Polo's descriptive gifts provided much significant information on the inventions and exotica of the East. Marco Polo's description of porcelain appears to locate its origin in the province of Fujian. Though luxury goods dominate Marco Polo's descriptions of foreign produce, he did include some more domestic peculiarities such as the use of coal. When comparing other accounts of the Mongols and Chinese written by contemporary or near contemporary European visitors, there are some very significant omissions in Polo's text. The markets of the towns that Marco Polo describes would have been full of small book stalls selling cheaply printed popular handbooks and works of fiction, many of which were illustrated.
