A meticulous description of currency and salt production could restore Marco Polo's honor by proving  that he really did go to China, a new study into the explorer's accounts of the Far East suggests.

"Polo was not a swindler," said Hans Ulrich Vogel, professor of Chinese studies at the German University of Tübingen.

Vogel reexamines the great Venetian traveler in a new book titled "Marco Polo Was in China."

"The strongest evidence is that he provided complex and detailed information about monetary conditions, salt production, public revenues and administrative geography that have been overlooked so far, but are fully corroborated in Chinese sources," Vogel told Discovery News.

The historian noted that these Chinese sources were collated or translated long after Marco Polo’s time.

"So he could not have drawn on them. He could not even read Chinese," he said....