Patrick Süskind's Perfume follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in Paris in 1738, with a gift for scent and no scent of his own. His path runs from the Innocents cemetery to a mountain cave, and then to Grasse, where his craft turns murderous.
The route follows the book from Paris to the Plomb du Cantal, Montpellier and Grasse, and ends in Barcelona, where Tom Tykwer's film rebuilt Paris. Only a few places are named exactly; the rest are approximate.
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.
Haruhi Suzumiya never names its city: it is Nishinomiya in Hyogo, with North High on Nishinomiya Kita High School, the SOS Brigade's café on Coffee-ya Dream, stops at Kōyōen and Mount Kabuto. The story follows Kyon and a classmate's club for aliens, time travellers and espers.
The route visits the real places that served as models: the school, two stations, a riverside park, a mountain and Koshien Stadium. Story place names are altered, so most pins mark a model, not a set.
Detective Conan is the story of a teenage detective shrunk to a child's size, and its author comes from a small coastal town in Tottori, Japan. Gosho Aoyama was born in Daiei, now part of Hokuei, and the town has turned itself into Conan Town.
The route visits the birthplace, the Conan-themed station, the bridge, the manga museum and the airport that carries Conan's name. The sources do not tie any story scene to these places, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
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.
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.
In September 1786 Goethe slipped away from Carlsbad at 3 in the morning, telling none of his friends, and headed for Italy. He was arrested for drawing a castle, met the ancient world at Verona, and shared a house in Rome with a painter.
The route follows his diary from Carlsbad over the Brenner and the Italian lakeshore to Verona, Venice and Rome, then to Vesuvius and Sicily. Some stops are towns or mountains rather than single buildings; the pin accuracy says which.
Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas, 1799–1804: Cumaná in Venezuela, the electric eels of Calabozo, Chimborazo in Ecuador, Callao in Peru, the silver mine at Guanajuato and Jefferson's White House. He and Aimé Bonpland spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing.
This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.
Miguel Hidalgo's revolt began Mexico's war of independence in Dolores on 16 September 1810. The route runs from the conspirators' house in Querétaro through the Alhóndiga at Guanajuato and the near-miss at Mexico City to the execution in Chihuahua.
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.
On 6 January 1482, a poet, a gypsy dancer, a deaf bellringer and a tormented priest cross paths in the Paris of Victor Hugo's imagination. It is a city of crowds, bonfires, gibbets and a cathedral that is almost a character in its own right.
This route follows the story from the Palais de Justice to the square where punishments were held, the beggars' court, the Seine bridge, Notre-Dame itself and the hilltop gibbet. Much of medieval Paris is gone, so most pins mark an area rather than a surviving building.
Victor Frankenstein grows up on the shore of Lake Geneva, builds his creature in the university town of Ingolstadt, and spends the rest of the book running from it, across a glacier above Chamonix, to a rock in the Orkneys and back to the lake. Mary Shelley's novel is a chain of scenes scattered over several countries rather than one trip.
This route visits six of them in story order, quoting the novel's Project Gutenberg text. The novel names towns and a glacier but rarely a building, so most pins mark a town or area.
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.
Lin Zexu's crackdown on the opium trade in Canton in 1839 set off a war that ended three years later with a treaty signed on a British warship in the Yangtze. The route follows it from the Pearl River to Nanjing.
Seven stops cover the confiscation, the destruction of the opium at Humen, the clashes at Chuenpi and Dinghai, the raising of the flag at Hong Kong, the fall of Zhenjiang and the treaty talks at Jinghai Temple. Several places have changed beyond recognition, which the notes mark.
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.
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.
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, but Hong Kong was the city that shaped him: a Nathan Road childhood, Wing Chun lessons with Ip Man, and the film studios that made him a star. This route follows his documented life and the places where his films and legacy meet.
It runs from a Kowloon flat and school days, through a surviving Enter the Dragon location and the hospital where he died, to the statue and museum that remember him. Where accounts differ, the stop says so.
Two love stories shot in guerrilla style across Hong Kong in 1994: a policeman who buys cans of pineapple while he waits for a month to end, and a girl at a fast-food counter who sneaks into a policeman's flat.
The route follows the plot from a Tsim Sha Tsui nightclub to a block of guesthouses, then across the harbour to Lan Kwai Fong and the Mid-Levels escalator, and ends at Kai Tak, the old airport in Fallen Angels. Chungking Express stops are filming sites; the Midnight Express pin is approximate.
Water Margin follows 108 spirits freed from a sealed hall on Longhu Mountain as they become the outlaws of Liangshan Marsh, with stops at Mount Wutai and the Xunyang Tower. A real Song Jiang appears in the Song History; the marsh silted up centuries ago.
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.
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.
