Marco Polo went to China. Who made the journey the other way?

Time away

about 14 years

On the map

17,300 kmat least, through the places named

One detail

“a few under thirty” countries crossed

In 399 a Buddhist monk named Faxian left Chang'an with four companions. Chinese monasteries had only fragments of the rules of monastic life, and he wanted to bring the complete texts back from India.

Beyond Dunhuang the party crossed a desert that Faxian describes in one sentence: no birds in the air, no animals on the ground, and the way marked only by the dried bones of those who had died on it.

It took him six years to reach central India, where he stayed six more, copying texts at Pataliputra, the old imperial capital on the Ganges. He then went down the Ganges to the port of Tamralipti, spent two more years copying texts there, and sailed to Sri Lanka. In a temple on the island he watched a merchant offer a fan of white silk made in China, and wept: his companions had died or stayed behind, and he had not seen anything from home in years.

The voyage back nearly killed him. A storm drove his ship for thirteen days, and after more than ninety days at sea it reached an island he calls Java-dvipa, probably Java or Sumatra. On the next ship, bound for Guangzhou, the Brahmins on board blamed the Buddhist monk for the weather and wanted him put ashore on an island. His patron refused. The crew lost its way, ran almost out of water and landed more than eighty days later on the coast of Shandong, over 1,500 kilometres north of where it had been heading.

His account ends by counting the years and the countries: “a few under thirty”. He set the whole journey down so that others would know what he had seen.

Meanwhile In 410, while Faxian was in India or Sri Lanka, the Visigoths sacked Rome.

Time away

16 years

On the map

17,800 kmat least, through the places named

One detail

657 texts brought home on 20 horses

Xuanzang left in 629 without permission. The Tang dynasty had only just taken power, the frontier was closed and people were forbidden to leave the country. The governor of Liangzhou, told that a monk meant to go west, urged him to return to the capital.

In the desert beyond the last watchtower he dropped his water bag. “A supply enough for 1,000 li was lost in a moment,” his biographer writes. He started back, stopped after a few kilometres and turned west again, because he had sworn not to take a step east until he reached India. For four nights and five days he had no water. On the fifth night his horse suddenly turned off the track and led him to grass and a pool.

The road took him through Turfan, over the Tian Shan, to Samarkand and across the Hindu Kush. At Bamiyan he described a standing Buddha cut into the cliff, “140 or 150 feet” high, whose “golden hues sparkle on every side”. The Bamiyan statues stood until March 2001, when the Taliban blew them up.

He spent years at Nalanda, the monastery where, his biographer says, some 10,000 monks always lived, and went as far south as Kanchipuram. When he came home in 645 he brought 657 texts, loaded on twenty horses. He spent the rest of his life translating them.

Nine centuries later his journey became the subject of Journey to the West, a novel printed in 1592, in which a monk travels to India guarded by a monkey king.

Meanwhile In 632, three years after Xuanzang set out, the Prophet Muhammad died in Medina.

Time away

11 years

On the map

not measured

One detail

found Chinese painters and weavers in Kufa

The order of his route is not known; the line joins the places he describes.

Du Huan did not set out to explore. In 751 he was with the army of General Gao Xianzhi, which reached, a relative of his writes, “the Western Sea”. Historians take this to mean he was captured at the battle of Talas, where Abbasid troops defeated the Tang army. He spent the next eleven years in the lands of the caliphate.

In Kufa, in today's Iraq, he described people who “worship Heaven five times a day”, drink no wine and listen to no music, and a ruler who every seventh day climbs to a high seat and addresses the faithful in a prayer hall that holds tens of thousands. He also saw ostriches, birds “with feet like a camel's”.

He found Chinese there too, and names them: two painters from the capital region, Fan Shu and Liu Ci, and two silk weavers from Hedong, one of them called Lü Li.

Around 762 he sailed home on a merchant ship and landed at Guangzhou. His book is lost. About 1,500 characters survive because his relative Du You copied them into an encyclopedia finished in 801.

Meanwhile In 762, the year Du Huan headed home, the caliph al-Mansur began building Baghdad.

Time away

4 years

On the map

10,900 kmat least, through the places named

One detail

“more than 20,000 li” on the road west

In 1219 Genghis Khan, campaigning in Central Asia, sent a messenger with a golden tablet to fetch a Daoist master from Shandong, Qiu Chuji, known as Changchun. Changchun was past 70. He set out in 1220 with nineteen disciples.

The journey took two years: across Mongolia, over the Altai, through Samarkand and into the Hindu Kush, where the khan was camped. His disciple Li Zhichang wrote everything down: snow in the passes, the gardens of Samarkand, an eclipse of the sun seen on the Kerulen river.

In May 1222 Genghis asked him to sit, had a meal brought, and asked: “Have you a medicine of immortality?” Changchun replied: “There are means for preserving life, but no medicines for immortality.” The khan praised him for his candour.

Before setting off west in 1221, he told his disciples he would be back in three years. He returned in 1224.

Meanwhile In 1223 Mongol generals from the same campaign defeated the Rus' princes and the Cumans on the Kalka river.

Time away

never returned

On the map

18,200 kmat least, through the places named

One detail

letters for the pope and the kings of France and England

Bar Sauma was a Christian monk from Khanbaliq, the Mongol capital now called Beijing. He belonged to the Church of the East and spoke a Turkic language; Syriac writers of the time call him and his disciple Markos Uighurs. In the 1270s the two set out to pray in Jerusalem.

They never got there, because wars had closed the roads. Markos was chosen patriarch of the Church of the East, and in 1287 Arghun, the Mongol ruler of Persia, sent Bar Sauma to Europe to propose an alliance against the Mamluks, who held Jerusalem.

In Constantinople he saw Hagia Sophia. In Naples he watched a sea battle from a rooftop. In Paris King Philip IV showed him the Crown of Thorns, and he was taken round the city's schools, which his account credits with 30,000 pupils. In Gascony, then ruled by England, Edward I asked him to celebrate the Eucharist, and the king and his nobles took communion from a monk born in Beijing.

Back in Rome at Easter 1288, he received communion from the new pope, Nicholas IV. The alliance never happened. Bar Sauma died in Baghdad in January 1294 and never saw his home city again.

Meanwhile In 1287, as Bar Sauma reached Rome, Marco Polo was in China, in the service of Kublai Khan.

Time away

a year and a half

On the map

6,900 kmat least, through the places named

One detail

stayed “more than a year” and wrote 40 chapters

In 1296 Zhou Daguan, a man from Wenzhou, sailed for Cambodia with an embassy the Yuan court had ordered the year before. They put to sea from Wenzhou in the spring, reached Champa in less than a month, then fought contrary winds until the autumn, when they reached Angkor. He stayed more than a year.

He described the city gates: bridges lined with 54 stone giants hauling on nine-headed serpents, and above the gate five great stone heads of the Buddha facing the four directions.

He watched the king ride out standing on an elephant with a golden sword in his hand, preceded by three to five hundred palace women carrying lit candles, even in daylight. He noted that trade was done by women, that Chinese goods were in great demand, from Wenzhou lacquerware to Quanzhou's green ceramics, and that what the locals wanted most, beans and wheat, could not be brought from China.

He also explains why Chinese sailors deserted there: nobody needs clothes, rice is easy to get, so are women, houses are easy to build and trade is easy to do.

His short book is the only surviving first-hand account of daily life in the Khmer Empire. The first European known to have seen Angkor, the Portuguese friar António da Madalena, arrived in 1586.

Meanwhile In 1295 Marco Polo returned to Venice after 24 years away.

Time away

7 voyages in 28 years

On the map

20,800 kmat least, through the places named

One detail

“more than 30 countries” and “more than a hundred thousand li” at sea

Zheng He was born into a Muslim family in Yunnan. As a boy he was captured by Ming armies, castrated and placed in the service of the prince who became the Yongle Emperor.

Between 1405 and 1433 he led seven expeditions across the ocean. In 1431, while the fleet waited at Changle for the north wind, he had an inscription carved in stone. There, as in a second inscription from the same year, he writes that each time he commanded “several tens of thousands” of men on “more than a hundred” great ships, that the fleet reached more than 30 countries, as far as Hormuz, Aden and Mogadishu, and that it crossed “more than a hundred thousand li” of open water, where “huge waves rise like mountains”.

The fleet carried home what those countries sent: lions and leopards from Hormuz, zebras from Mogadishu, ostriches from Brava, and from Aden a giraffe, recorded in the inscription under its Arabic name, zurafa, and as qilin, the Chinese mythical beast it was identified with. A giraffe had already reached the court in 1414, brought from Bengal. It was presented to the emperor as a qilin, the sign of a wise reign, and he, the historian Sally K. Church writes, played the omen down.

The voyages stopped after 1433. Zheng He probably died on the last of them, perhaps at Calicut. Ninety-three years after his first fleet set out for Calicut, Vasco da Gama's ships anchored in the same port.

Meanwhile In 1405, as the first fleet sailed, Mircea the Elder ruled Wallachia. In 1415 the Portuguese took Ceuta, in North Africa.