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.
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.
Season 3 of The White Lotus follows wealthy guests and staff at a Thai wellness resort. It opens with gunshots and a body in a lake, then rewinds a week. Mike White wrote and directed all eight episodes, filmed from February to August 2024 in Bangkok, Phuket and Ko Samui.
This route visits six real places in story order, from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui to a Bangkok hotel and a Muay Thai stadium. The on-screen resort was stitched together from several hotels, so no single place is the White Lotus.
In 1581 the African slave Diogo comes to Kyoto with a Jesuit delegation and is handed to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who renames him Yasuke and makes him a samurai. That year Nobunaga's army crushes the ninja province of Iga, where the young shinobi Naoe loses her father and inherits his Hidden Blade.
From there the two hunt the same conspiracy across Kansai: the port of Sakai, the temple at Honnō-ji where Nobunaga dies, a kofun in Settsu, the castle of Shōryūji at Yamazaki, the shrines of Yamato, and the Templar recruiting ground of Kii. Most stops are real castles, temples and tombs that the game rebuilds.
In 629 a young Chinese Buddhist monk, troubled by contradictions between the Chinese translations of the scriptures, slipped out of the Tang capital in defiance of a ban on foreign travel and set off for India to find the original texts. Xuanzang crossed the Taklamakan's edge, the Tian Shan and the Hindu Kush, studied for years in India's great monastery at Nalanda, and came home sixteen years later with 657 Sanskrit texts carried by a train of horses.
His travel record, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, is still a key source for the history of Central Asia and India, and his journey inspired the classic novel Journey to the West. The route follows him there and back. There are no travel tips for Afghanistan.
