Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
David Lean's 1962 epic follows T. E. Lawrence through the Arab Revolt, but most of its Arabia was built in Spain. Seville played Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus, while Almería and a beach near Carboneras supplied the desert and a whole replica of Aqaba.
The route follows the story's order and keeps history apart from the film's shooting locations. Stops say plainly whether they show what happened in 1917 or where the cameras stood.
Nikolay Przhevalsky made one expedition to the Ussuri region and four to Central Asia, crossing the Gobi, reaching the wandering lake of Lop Nur and getting within 260 km of Lhasa. He died at Karakol on Lake Issyk-Kul, on the eve of a fifth journey.
This route follows six stops from those journeys and his years between them. They were separate expeditions rather than one trip, so the markers are not joined. Dates are years only.
In August 1803 two small Russian sloops sailed from Kronstadt on the first Russian voyage round the world. Adam Johann von Krusenstern led the expedition on the Nadezhda, and Yuri Lisyansky captained the Neva; the Neva was back almost three years later.
This route follows seven turning points, from the Marquesas and Kamchatka to the Tlingit fort at Sitka, the closed door of Nagasaki and the tea trade at Canton. The two ships often sailed apart, so the stops are markers, not one line. Day dates follow the main source, which gives the outward voyage in the modern (New Style) calendar; Russian logs of the time used the Old Style, so the homecoming in 1806 is given by season only. Pins mark towns and bays, not exact anchorages.
In 1725 a Russian naval captain set out across a continent to answer one question: are Asia and America joined? Vitus Bering's two Kamchatka expeditions, the second of them part of the Great Northern Expedition, took years of hardship to answer it.
The route follows seven places from the Tsar's order in Saint Petersburg to Bering's death on an uninhabited island in 1741. The stops are not one continuous line, so they are shown as separate markers. Dates are Old Style (Julian), as Russian records of the time kept them; the modern calendar runs 11 days ahead.
Two girls grow up in a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s, one pushed on by school, the other by sheer brilliance. Elena Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels follow their friendship from a doll thrown down a cellar chute to a package in the mail in 2010.
The route runs from the district of the first book through Ischia, Pisa, San Giovanni a Teduccio and Florence to Turin. The books never name the streets, so most pins mark areas, not buildings.
A retired sake brewer set out on foot to measure Japan. Over ten surveys starting in 1800 Inō Tadataka and his team paced the coasts and paths of the country, and maps based on his work were still in use in 1924.
The route follows his life in places: the brewer's house at Sawara, the shrine where he prayed before the first survey, Mount Hakodate and the far end of that journey in Hokkaido, Nihonbashi, his grave and the shrine that honours him. The surveys were separate expeditions, so the stops are not one connected walk.
In 1613 a samurai from Sendai set out to Mexico in a galleon built for the mission to meet the King of Spain and the Pope. Hasekura Tsunenaga's embassy took seven years, crossed Mexico and the ocean, and came home to a Japan that was closing its doors to Christianity.
The route follows him from the port of Tsukinoura through Acapulco, Mexico City, Havana, Madrid, Saint-Tropez and Rome, then back via Manila to Nagasaki. Japanese dates are given in the Gregorian calendar. Most pins mark towns or harbours, not documented buildings.
After the 2016 earthquakes, Kumamoto Prefecture and One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, who comes from the prefecture, answered with ten bronze statues of the Straw Hat Pirates, set up in towns across the region.
The route visits them in the order they were unveiled, from Luffy at the prefectural office in 2018 to Jinbe by the sea in 2022, and tells why each crew member was sent where. The statues are real places to visit; the "Hino Country" story around them is the project's own.
On 16 September 1810 a parish priest in a small Mexican town called his parishioners to arms, and within weeks a vast, ill-armed army was marching on the capital. Miguel Hidalgo's revolt began Mexico's war of independence.
The route follows it from the plot in Querétaro and the Cry of Dolores through the storming of the Alhóndiga in Guanajuato, the near-miss at Mexico City and the defeat at Calderón Bridge, to the ambush in Coahuila and the execution in Chihuahua. Violence is part of the story and is named plainly.
In the autumn of 1600 two armies met at Sekigahara to decide who would hold power after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. One day in the fog gave Tokugawa Ieyasu a decisive victory and put him on the road to the shogunate.
The route follows the campaign from the siege of Fushimi to the castles of Mino, the field of Sekigahara, the fall of Mitsunari's Sawayama and his burial in Kyoto, and ends at Edo Castle in 1603. Dates inside Japan's old calendar are labelled as such.
In March 1697 a great Russian embassy left Moscow for Europe, and the tsar went with it incognito as "Peter Mikhailov", though at 2.03 metres he was one of the tallest men around. He worked in shipyards, studied gunnery and tried to broaden the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire.
The route follows the journey stop by stop: Riga and Königsberg, the Dutch shipyards, London and Deptford, then Vienna and the meeting with Augustus II at Rava-Ruska. Dates follow each source: the Dutch article uses the Gregorian calendar, the English and Russian sources the Old Style, so the labels say which.
Jules Verne sends a Czar's courier 3,400 miles across Russia: from a night fête in Moscow, through the Urals and the Tartar invasion, to besieged Irkutsk. Michael Strogoff carries one letter, a false name and a promise to the Czar.
The route follows the book from the Kremlin through Nizhny Novgorod, the Urals, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Lake Baikal to Irkutsk. Verne names towns rather than buildings, so every pin is approximate.
Tolstoy's novel begins on a Moscow railway platform and ends on another. Between them Levin finds Kitty on a skating pond, Anna meets Vronsky off a train, and the lovers' story runs through snowstorms, a racecourse and a spa town before they flee to Italy.
The nine stops follow the novel's order across Russia, Germany and Italy. Tolstoy rarely names the buildings, so most pins mark the station or town the scene points to.
In 1751 the Qianlong Emperor left Beijing for the first of six tours south to Jiangnan, the last in 1784. Much of the way ran along the Grand Canal, and the tours took in the dikes of the Huai, the cities of Jiangnan and the holy sites of Shandong.
This route follows the first two tours. In 1751: the Hongze Lake embankment, West Lake and Mount Tai. In 1757: Yangzhou, Suzhou and Qufu. Dates follow the Chinese lunar calendar used in the court records.
A poet who nearly lost his head for his verses, Su Shi (Su Dongpo) was banished to Huangzhou, Huizhou and Hainan, and wrote some of his best work in exile.
The route follows his life in order, from his family home in Sichuan through the 1079 trial, three places of banishment, and his death at Changzhou in 1101. Several stops are rebuilt memorials or city-level markers, and each says so.
China's first emperor unified the warring states in 221 BC and spent his last decade building: a capital, canals, walls, palaces and a vast tomb. Some of what is told about him is documented history; some is legend.
This route visits seven places tied to him, from Xianyang to the Terracotta Army. Stops marked as legend or speculative (the elixir quest on Zhifu Island, the lost course of the Qin wall) are kept apart from sites that archaeology has confirmed.
Water Margin follows 108 spirits released from a sealed hall who return as outlaws, with Song Jiang as their chief. Its episodes range from Daoism's mountain in Jiangxi to the Shandong marsh, a tiger-haunted ridge, a Yangtze tavern and the Hangzhou tide.
Each stop is a scene from the novel, set beside what is documented: a real Song Jiang appears in the Song History, and the real Liangshan Marsh silted up centuries ago. Places tied to the story only by later tradition are marked.
Sun Wukong is born from a stone on a flowery mountain and later guards a monk on the long road west to fetch the sutras. The novel is set on the road to India, but its geography is almost entirely fantasy.
This route follows five episodes in the novel's order and pins the real places that share their names or were later tied to them. Some are named in the text; Huaguo Shan and the Flaming Mountains are linked only by later tradition.
Walking the island of Shikoku from temple to temple, in the footsteps of the monk Kūkai, is one of Japan's oldest pilgrimages.
This route visits seven of the 88 temples, from Temple 1 in Tokushima to the finish at Temple 88, passing the four provinces, Kūkai's birthplace and the highest temple. The legends here are temple tradition, not proven history.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; three days later, another on Nagasaki. This route follows the two days on the ground, from the bridge that served as the aiming point to the places that survived or were rebuilt.
It starts in Hiroshima at Aioi Bridge, the hypocenter and the Dome, then moves to Nagasaki's hypocenter, cathedral and shrine, and ends with the two museums and parks built in 1955. Death tolls are estimates and are given as the ranges researchers publish.
Between 1180 and 1185 Japan's two great warrior clans, Taira and Minamoto, fought over the realm, and the war ended with a child emperor, a fleet and the tide at Dan-no-ura. It was the war that led to the first shogun.
This route visits seven battlefield sites in date order, from the bridge at Uji to the Kanmon Straits. Documented events are kept apart from the Heike Monogatari's legends, which the text attributes to the tale. Most battle areas are approximate.
Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel follows Prince Genji from the capital to exile on the Suma shore and, in its last ten chapters, to Uji. Many of its places are real shrines and temples that visitors can still enter.
The route runs by chapter, from Kitayama to Uji, then to the temples tied to the author. Chapters are fiction; the Ishiyama-dera writing story is tradition, and Rozan-ji is one scholar's identification.
Neku Sakuraba wakes in the Shibuya crowd with no memory and is pulled into the Reapers' Game, a week-long contest of missions that decides whether the dead live on or vanish. Square Enix's 2007 Nintendo DS cult classic turned the district into its whole stage, keeping the landmarks and changing the shop names.
The route follows Neku from the scramble crossing to Hachikō, the ramen shop on Dōgenzaka, the Cat Street café, the hidden Shibuya River and the walk back through Udagawa. In-game places are mostly stand-ins, so pins are approximate except two icons.
