Homer's Trojan War on the map: Mycenae, Aulis, where the fleet waited, the hill of Hisarlik, now identified with Troy, and the Scamander plain, then Pylos and Ithaca from the Odyssey. Each stop is told from Homer, with archaeology kept apart.
The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia.
The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
Two Naughty Dog adventures, two treasure hunts: the Drake brothers chase a pirate hoard from a hidden cathedral in the Scottish Highlands to the fabled pirate utopia of Libertalia, and Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross follow a trail of Hindu temples through India's Western Ghats to the Tusk of Ganesh.
The route follows both games in order. Madagascar and Karnataka have real pirate coves and real Hoysala temples behind the fiction, but the games' exact settings are invented, so every pin marks the nearest real place.
A rabbi shapes a figure from river clay and a slip of paper gives it life. The Golem of Prague is among the best-known legends of the city, yet historians find it first told in the 19th century, long after the real Rabbi Loew died in 1609.
The route follows the legend from the Vltava to the Old New Synagogue and a modern television tower, and sets it beside what the sources show: an emperor's audience, a tomb and a 1915 novel.
The Butterfly Lovers runs from Zhu Yingtai's home in Shangyu and the school in Hangzhou to Liang Shanbo's temple and tomb in Ningbo. The girl who studied disguised as a boy is betrothed to another man; when Liang dies, the earth opens at his grave and the two fly away as butterflies.
The route follows the tale from the heroine's home in Shangyu, to the school in Hangzhou, to the Ningbo temple and tomb, then to a rival claim in Yixing and a statue in Verona. Every Chinese site is local tradition rather than proven history.
Legend of the White Snake begins on Mount Emei and moves to Hangzhou's West Lake, Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang and Leifeng Pagoda. Two snake spirits take human form and an abbot tries to separate them.
The route follows the popular opera version from the legend's mountain origin, through Hangzhou's West Lake and the flooded temple at Jinshan, to Broken Bridge and the pagoda where the White Snake ends up imprisoned. The tale exists in many versions; this route follows the standard opera telling.
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent a fleet from Nanjing across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, seven times, under the admiral Zheng He. It came home with ambassadors and exotic animals.
This route follows the sequence from the shipyard in Nanjing through Java, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut and Hormuz to Malindi in East Africa, and ends at his empty tomb. Most ports are approximate pins, and later temple traditions are marked as such.
Qin Shi Huang's China: his capital Xianyang, Mount Tai, where he proclaimed the empire's unity, the Lingqu Canal near Guilin, and his tomb at Mount Li with the Terracotta Army. He unified the warring states in 221 BC; some of what is told about him 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.
Jin Yong, the grand master of martial arts fiction, was born in Haining, Zhejiang. This route follows him out of the family house, to the tide he loved, and then across China to the places his heroes fight: a lake in Jiaxing, an island off Zhoushan, the mountains and monastery of Hua, Shaolin and Wudang, and a cell under Hangzhou's West Lake.
The real landmarks are documented; the sects, manors and duels set at them are fiction. Each stop says which is which, and where a pin marks the real place, it is not a scene.
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.
Oath brothers, a hermit strategist, a bridge held by one man and a battle on the Yangtze: the classic novel turns the fall of the Han dynasty into a saga of loyalty and cunning. This route follows Liu Bei from a peach garden to his deathbed.
The novel is fiction built on the Records of the Three Kingdoms. Each stop says what the novel tells, what the record says, and which places are linked to the story only by later tradition, such as the Zhuozhou temple and the disputed Red Cliffs.
Game Science scanned real Chinese temples, pagodas and statues to build Black Myth: Wukong, and most of the sites on its list of filming locations are in Shanxi: 27 of 36.
This route visits seven of them, from the cliff-hung temple near Datong to a tower in Yongji. Each is tied to the game by Wikipedia or a published location guide, but the game does not say which scene copies which site.
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.
Japan's Kumano Kodō runs from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu to Kumano Hongū Taisha, then by boat to Shingū and on to Nachi's stone steps and falls. For over a thousand years emperors, samurai and commoners walked these trails to the three grand shrines; Go-Shirakawa made the trip 34 times.
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
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.
In April 1701 a lord drew a blade inside Edo Castle, and two years later forty-seven of his leaderless samurai stormed the mansion of the man he had attacked. The documented story runs from a corridor in Edo, through a surrendered castle and a quiet retreat near Kyoto, to a night raid and a temple cemetery in Tokyo.
The route sticks to dated events and places. The legend of Chūshingura, the later play, is kept to the final stop, where it is set apart from what happened.
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.
Two Godzillas, sixty years apart, wreck the same city. In 1954 he comes out of Tokyo Bay at Shinagawa and walks into Ginza; in Shin Godzilla (2016) he lands at Kamata, mutates at Kitashinagawa and is finally frozen beside Tokyo Station.
The route follows the 1954 film first, then Shin Godzilla, using the places named in each story. Where a scene was shot elsewhere, the stop says so.
El Dorado is Lake Guatavita, 57 km northeast of Bogotá, where legend sets the gilded zipa's raft, with stops at Funza, Sogamoso and the Gold Museum. The ritual was written down generations after the conquest; the gold and the draining are history.
The route follows both threads, and each stop says which is which: Quesada's march in 1537, the lake itself, the drainage, a rival lake, the cave where a raft turned up in 1969 and the Bogotá museum that keeps it.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
Pedro Almodóvar has shot the majority of his films in Madrid, and Madrid's tourism office lists the exact streets, bars and squares where his scenes happened.
The route follows eight filming spots in order of release, from the El Rastro bar of Labyrinth of Passion in 1982 to the Comendadoras square of Parallel Mothers in 2021, with one detour to Almagro in La Mancha for Volver.
Washington Irving came to Granada in 1829 and ended up living in a palace of the Moorish kings. With a 17-year-old local guide named Mateo Ximenes at his elbow, he gathered the legends that became Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.
This route follows the book through six places: the gate with the magic hand and key, Irving's rooms, the Hall of Ambassadors, the Court of Lions, the Generalife and the Tower of the Princesses. Several tales are legend as much as history, so the pins mark the places where Irving tells them.
Spain's oldest surviving epic poem follows Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, from a humiliating exile out of Castile to the conquest of Valencia, and then to a trial in Toledo after his sons-in-law abandon his daughters.
The route runs from Vivar and Burgos through Cardeña and Valencia to Corpes and Toledo. The poem and the historical Cid differ in many details, and the site of Corpes is disputed.
