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.
Legend and archaeology meet at six places, from Agamemnon's citadel to Odysseus's island. Each stop is told from Homer's text, with what archaeologists have found kept apart and honestly labelled.
The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
A boy born in Eisleben becomes a monk, a professor and the man who defied an emperor. Along the way he vows in a thunderstorm, challenges the church over indulgences, is spirited away in disguise and ends his life where it began.
The route follows Luther through seven places in Germany: his birth house, the Erfurt monastery, the Wittenberg church doors, the Diet of Worms, the Wartburg, his Wittenberg home and the house where he died. The Worms pin is approximate, and the Castle Church doors story is tradition.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony.
It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
In the Soviet series Seventeen Moments of Spring, a spy named Stierlitz serves in the SS in Berlin in the last weeks of the Second World War. Very little of it was filmed in the Berlin of 1945.
This route follows the story through the places that played its settings, from a Moscow-region park posing as the Bavarian Forest to Riga, Meissen and the hills of Georgia standing in for Bern and the Alps. Every pin marks a stand-in, not a place from the plot.
In 1937 Amelia Earhart tried to become the first woman to fly around the world, on a roughly equatorial route. Two attempts, a crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal over the Pacific turned her flight into one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
In 1799 the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland sailed for Spain's American realms and spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing across them. They watched electric eels fight wild horses in Venezuela, pushed up Chimborazo, watched a planet cross the Sun from Peru and ended as Jefferson's guest at the White House.
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.
On 16 September 1810 a parish priest in a small Mexican town called his parishioners to arms, and within weeks a vast, ill-armed army was marching on the capital. Miguel Hidalgo's revolt began Mexico's war of independence.
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.
In the autumn of 1600 two armies met at Sekigahara to decide who would hold power after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. One day in the fog gave Tokugawa Ieyasu a decisive victory and put him on the road to the shogunate.
The route follows the campaign from the siege of Fushimi to the castles of Mino, the field of Sekigahara, the fall of Mitsunari's Sawayama and his burial in Kyoto, and ends at Edo Castle in 1603. Dates inside Japan's old calendar are labelled as such.
For over a thousand years, emperors, samurai and ordinary people have walked mountain trails to three shrines of the ancient syncretic Kumano religion. Emperor Go-Shirakawa alone made the trip 34 times, and in the Muromachi period the stream of walkers was called a "pilgrimage of ants".
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; three days later, another on Nagasaki. This route follows the two days on the ground, from the bridge that served as the aiming point to the places that survived or were rebuilt.
It starts in Hiroshima at Aioi Bridge, the hypocenter and the Dome, then moves to Nagasaki's hypocenter, cathedral and shrine, and ends with the two museums and parks built in 1955. Death tolls are estimates and are given as the ranges researchers publish.
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.
On 12 April 1961 a pilot climbed into a small capsule on top of a rocket and became the first person in space. The flight lasted less than two hours; the road to it took a year of training, and the days after it turned a pilot into a worldwide celebrity.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
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.
Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of Irish legend who gained all knowledge by burning his thumb on a salmon, saved Tara from a fire-breather and, in folk tales, built the Giant's Causeway to reach a Scottish rival. His stories are tied to real hills, rivers and rocks, many of them still named for him.
The route follows his legend from the Boyne of his boyhood through Tara, the Hill of Allen, Slieve Gullion and Benbulben, then to the tall tales of Lough Neagh, the Causeway and Fingal's Cave. Nothing here is history: pins mark where tradition places each tale.
At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters.
The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
Toru Watanabe, a drama student in late-1960s Tokyo, looks back on the years he spent between two women: Naoko, the fragile girlfriend of his dead best friend, and Midori, a classmate who is everything Naoko is not. Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel made him a superstar in Japan.
The route follows Watanabe across the city: his dormitory, a long Sunday walk by the moat, Naoko's apartment in Kokubunji, the campus, the streetcar to Midori's neighbourhood, a house at the edge of Kichijōji and the platform at Ueno. Murakami drew on his own student years, but the novel's dormitory and university are invented, so those two pins mark real stand-ins.
In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey.
The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.
On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home.
The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.
Santiago, a shepherd boy from Andalusia, keeps dreaming of treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. A fortune-teller and a mysterious old king send him across the strait to Africa, where he is robbed in Tangier, falls in love at an oasis and crosses a desert of warring tribes. Paulo Coelho's 1988 fable has sold more than 150 million copies.
The route follows the boy from a ruined church to the Giza plateau and back again. The book keeps its geography loose, so most pins mark the best-known place for a scene rather than a spot the author names.
Private First Class Ronald "Red" Daniels lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day with the 1st Infantry Division and fights his way into Germany with one squad, until a friend is captured and the search for him ends at a concentration camp. Call of Duty: WWII is a 2017 game by Sledgehammer Games, and its campaign is set among real battles.
The route follows the missions in order: Omaha Beach, Marigny, Aachen, the Hürtgen Forest, the Ardennes, the bridge at Remagen and Berga, with the real battle each one echoes. Pins mark battle areas, not a mission's exact street.
HBO's Game of Thrones prequel was filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, and its Velaryon world is Cornish: the island seat of Driftmark is a tidal island, and the Stepstones war camp is a cove on the Lizard peninsula. For the capital and the free city of Pentos, the crew went to western and southern Spain.
The route follows the story from the Stepstones war (season 1, episode 3) through the Driftmark episodes to King's Landing in season 2. Sources do not name the exact streets used in Cáceres, so that pin marks the old town.
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.
Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, and by the end of the year the crown had passed through Harold Godwinson to William of Normandy. Between the two coronations lie three battles in three weeks, fought at opposite ends of England by a king who marched his army the length of the country twice.
The route follows the crown from Westminster to the Yorkshire landing of Harald Hardrada, Fulford and Stamford Bridge, then to Pevensey, Hastings and the field at Battle, and back to Westminster on Christmas Day. The exact ground of several battles is debated, so those pins mark the best-known sites.
