The boy born on the Onon River became the ruler of the largest land empire in history. This route follows him from the steppe camps of Khentii, through the war that began at a border town in Kazakhstan, to the siege of Samarkand and a death in the middle of a campaign.
The sources disagree on his birth year, his birthplace and his grave. Where the Secret History of the Mongols gives a legend and other sources give the record, the stops say which is which.
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.
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.
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.
In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan and did not come home for 24 years. Years later, in a Genoese prison, he dictated what he had seen to a fellow inmate, and The Travels of Marco Polo was the result.
The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
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.
In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan so rich in gold that Cairo talked about it for years. Arab chroniclers wrote of thousands of servants carrying gold bars and camels loaded with gold dust; historians today treat those numbers as a way of saying "more than anyone could imagine", not as a count. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 still shows him enthroned in the Sahara, holding up a piece of gold.
The route keeps to the places the sources actually record: the royal city of Mali, the camp below the pyramids, Cairo, Mecca, and Gao and Timbuktu on the way home. The road across the desert is not documented, so it is not drawn. The route offers no travel advice for Mali.
