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.
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.
Pushkin's only completed novel follows Pyotr Grinev, a young officer sent to a log-fenced fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the captain's daughter Masha and crosses paths with Pugachev, the rebel who claims to be Emperor Peter III. The book is a romanticized account of Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773-1774, not a record of it.
The route follows the novel from besieged Orenburg through the Belogorsk fortress, Berda, Kazan, Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow. Each stop separates what Pushkin invented from what history records; Belogorsk exists only on the page, with the real fortress of Tatishchevo as its stand-in.
A stranger who looks foreign joins two writers at Patriarch's Ponds, predicts a death, and Moscow's strangest spring begins. In Bulgakov's novel the devil, as Woland, visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes the cat Behemoth and the henchman Azazello, while Margarita bargains with him for the Master.
The route follows the Moscow chapters in order: the ponds where it all starts, a writers' club, a haunted flat, a stage show, a flight of revenge, a ball, a terrace beside the Kremlin and a farewell on the Sparrow Hills. Several places are invented or only inspired by real ones, and each stop says which.
Tolstoy's huge novel carries its aristocratic families from the drawing rooms of 1805 into the wars against Napoleon, and its battlefields are among the most famous in fiction: a forgotten battery, a wounded prince staring at the sky, a civilian in a white hat on the wrong hill at the right moment.
The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.
Agatha Christie's 1937 mystery puts Hercule Poirot on holiday in Aswan, waiting to board the Nile steamer Karnak. Among his fellow passengers are a jilted woman stalking her ex-fiancé's honeymoon, her former friend the heiress, and a boulder that comes uncomfortably close to the bride.
The route follows the steamer from Aswan to Wadi Halfa and ends at Karnak, where the 1978 film moves the falling stone. The novel itself puts that scene at Abu Simbel.
