The fabled Asian kingdom Columbus hoped to reach was Cipangu. The name was a European rendering of Japan, based largely on Marco Polo’s account of a wealthy island empire lying far east of China. Columbus believed that sailing west across the Atlantic would bring him to Asia, and Cipangu was one of the destinations he expected to encounter.
Columbus’s calculations severely underestimated the size of Earth and the distance between Europe and Asia. When his expedition reached Caribbean islands in 1492, he interpreted them as territories near the Asian mainland rather than as part of an unknown hemisphere. He continued using Asian place-names and searching for the realms described in travel literature.
Cipangu is commonly confused with Cathay, the medieval European name for China, or with India, a broad term Europeans used for parts of Asia. Those names referred to different places in Columbus’s imagined route: Cipangu was the island kingdom, while Cathay was China. The historical identification of Cipangu with Japan is widely accepted, although Polo’s description blended fact, hearsay, and exaggeration.