On another occasion he went on a mission to Cochin China, and by sea to the southern states of India, and he has left a vivid picture of the great trading cities of Malabar.

He might indeed have pondered with Ulysses, I am become a name For always roaming with a hungry heart, Much have I seen and known, cities of men, And manners, climates, countries, governments, Myself not least, but honoured of them all.
He describes the great capital Cambaluc (Peking) in the north, and the beautiful Kinsai (Hangchow) in the south.

He describes the Khan's summer palace at Shandu, with its woods and gardens, its marble palace, its bamboo pavilion swung like a tent from two hundred silken cords, its stud of white mares, and its wonder-working magicians.

Indeed his description of the summer palace is better known to Englishmen than any other part of his work, for Shandu is Xanadu, which Coleridge saw in a dream after he had been reading Marco's book and wove into wonderful verse: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph the sacred river ran, Past caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree, And here were forests, ancient as the hills Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Nor is it only palaces which Marco Polo describes, for he tells of the great canal and inland river trade of China, the exports and imports at its harbours, the paper money, the system of posts and caravanserais, which linked it together.

He gives an unsurpassed picture of that huge, rich, peaceful empire, full of wealth and commerce and learned men and beautiful things, and of its ruler Kublai Khan, one of the noblest monarchs who ever sat upon a throne, who, since 'China is a sea that salts all the rivers that flow into it,'[21] was far more than a barbarous Mongol khan, was in very truth a Chinese emperor, whose house, called by the Chinese the 'Yuan Dynasty', takes its place among the great dynasties of China.
Even more than Marco Polo tells us he must, indeed, have seen.