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.
Port Royal and Tortuga were built on a quiet St Vincent bay, Cannibal Island is Dominican rainforest, and a private Bahamian cay sits behind a famous duel.
This route follows the shoots from St Vincent in 2002 through Dominica in 2005 to Grand Bahama, where the ships were filmed in a hurricane season. Most pins mark areas, not exact sets; the sets themselves were built and taken down.
Hemingway wrote his last great novella in Cuba, about a fisherman and one enormous marlin. The places around it are real: the hotel room where he first lived, the bar he loved, the house where he wrote, and the fishing village next door.
This route follows the writer's Cuba from Old Havana to the harbour of Cojímar, where the Pilar was moored. The novella itself is under copyright, so the story is kept to its outline.
Finland's national epic was gathered, not invented: a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot walked into the forests of Karelia and wrote down what the old singers recited.
The route follows his collecting trips from 1832 to 1834, from Viena Karelia to his home at Kajaani and the first draft at Kuhmo, then visits three places the runes name: the Imatra rapids, the island of Saari and the Kemi river. The poem's geography is loose, so the last two pins are marked as guesses.
A five-year-old orphan is led up a Swiss mountain path to live with a grandfather the whole village avoids. Johanna Spyri's 1881 novel follows Heidi from the alm to a grand house in Frankfurt, where homesickness sends her sleepwalking, and back to the mountain, where her friend Klara finally comes to visit.
The route runs from Ragaz, where Spyri wrote the book, through Maienfeld and the alm above it to Frankfurt and the tourist Heididorf. Spyri never names the exact hamlet or house, so most pins mark an area or a tradition.
Bella Swan moves to the rainiest corner of Washington and falls for a vampire. Stephenie Meyer picked the town of Forks by searching for rainy places, and the story then carries Bella and Edward from the Olympic Peninsula to the clock tower of Volterra in Tuscany.
The route follows the first two novels from Forks through La Push and Port Angeles to Volterra, and ends in Montepulciano, the town that played Volterra in the film. The pins mark towns, not buildings.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world.
The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
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.
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.
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.
A girl from a rich family disguises herself as a boy to go to school, falls in love with a classmate who never guesses, and is promised to another man. When he dies, the earth opens at his grave and the two fly away as butterflies. One of China's four great folk tales, it is often called the oriental Romeo and Juliet.
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.
Ang Lee's wuxia romance sends a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword across a China that was assembled from many places. The film began shooting in Xinjiang on 31 July 1999 and then moved to the Jiangnan region and Beijing.
This route follows the story through the real locations behind it: a desert ghost city, two Anhui villages, the Anji bamboo forest, and Cangyan Mountain, which plays the fictional Wudang. The real Mount Wudang sits in the story, but the film was not shot there.
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.
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.
Pixar's Coco follows the boy Miguel from his shoemaking family's town of Santa Cecilia into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead. Neither world exists on a map, but the filmmakers drew on real Mexican villages, families and festivals, and Mexican guides have since linked more places to it.
This route follows five of those places in the order the story needs them. Almost every link is an inspiration, not a filming location, and the pins say so.
Clarín's novel hides Oviedo behind the name Vetusta, a provincial capital of gossip, piety and boredom where Ana Ozores, the Regenta, is slowly worn down. It begins with the Magistral watching the town through a telescope and ends with Ana fainting in his chapel.
The route follows seven scenes from the tower to the duel and the confessional, and ends at the modern statue of Ana. Spanish guides tie some scenes to real Oviedo; where they do not, the pin is approximate or absent.
In 1927 a former nobleman and a charming con man chase twelve dining chairs, one of them hiding family jewels, across the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov's comic novel follows them from a sleepy provincial town through Moscow and the Volga to the spa of Pyatigorsk, the Caucasus road and the Crimean coast.
The route marks six stops; Stargorod and Vasyuki are invented, so their pins are only candidate stand-ins.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
In June 1867 the steamship Quaker City left New York on what Mark Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion", a chartered trip to Europe and the Holy Land. A newspaper, the Alta California, paid for his place in exchange for fifty articles, and those letters grew into The Innocents Abroad.
This route follows eight stops: the Wall Street pier, the Azores, Tangier, Milan, Athens, a palace garden near Yalta, Jerusalem and the Sphinx. Each is told through Twain's own scenes, from donkey rides and hotel bills to the places that stopped his jokes. Where he does not name a spot, the pin marks the nearest known place.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film.
This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
Bohemia, 1403. Henry of Skalitz and Sir Hans Capon ride to Trosky Castle to find out which side Otto von Bergow is on, and the civil war between King Wenceslaus IV and King Sigismund drags them from the rocks of the Bohemian Paradise to the silver city of Kuttenberg, today Kutná Hora. The 2025 sequel by Warhorse Studios recreates its two big maps from real castles, villages and streets.
The route follows the story from Trosky to the siege of Suchdol. The game's version of each place is a 1403 reconstruction, so look for the castle ruins and rebuilt keeps rather than the exact buildings Henry sees. The first game's story ends just before it, so this route picks up at Trosky.
You start in a quiet town, pick a starter, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket. The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is invented, yet it is based on the real Kantō region of Japan, and fans have spent decades matching its towns to real places.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
Downton Abbey is set on a fictional Yorkshire estate between 1912 and 1925, but its great house stands in Hampshire and its village in Oxfordshire. This route follows the story, from the Titanic news of series 1 to the royal visit of the 2019 film, to the real places behind it.
It takes in Highclere Castle, Bampton's church and library, a prison in Lincoln, castles in Scotland and Northumberland, the Ealing stage where the kitchen was built, and the film's parade village and York streets. Lacock's pin marks the village, as the sources name no exact spot.
