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

*Seven journeys out of China, 399–1433*

Between 399 and 1433, roughly the span of Europe's Middle Ages, travellers from China crossed deserts where the only landmarks were the bones of the dead, told Genghis Khan there is no medicine for immortality, celebrated the Eucharist for the King of England and brought the emperor a giraffe. Most of them wrote down what they saw.

Marius Comper · 17 September 2026

## From Chang'an to Bordeaux, from Nanjing to Mogadishu

Marco Polo left Venice in 1271 and reached China in 1275. His book became Europe's picture of the traveller to the East. Travellers from China had been heading west for almost nine centuries by the time he arrived.

The map follows each route as you read. A solid line runs through the places the texts name; a dashed line marks a stretch whose order or path is not known. Distances are measured through those places, so the real journeys were longer.

## I. Faxian (法顯)

*399 – c. 412 · Buddhist monk, on the road for about 14 years*

- Time away: about 14 years
- On the map: 17,300 km (at 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.

## II. Xuanzang (玄奘)

*629 – 645 · Buddhist monk, 16 years on the road*

- Time away: 16 years
- On the map: 17,800 km (at 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.

## III. Du Huan (杜環)

*751 – 762 · soldier, prisoner, 11 years in the caliphate*

- 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.

What Du Huan wrote in Kufa, in Chinese:

- 樊淑 · 劉泚: painters from the capital region
- 呂禮: silk weaver from Hedong
- 一日五時禮天: “worship Heaven five times a day”

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

## IV. Changchun (長春)

*1220 – 1224 · Daoist master, summoned by Genghis Khan when past 70*

- Time away: 4 years
- On the map: 10,900 km (at 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.

## V. Rabban Bar Sauma (掃馬)

*c. 1275 – 1288 · Christian monk from Beijing, sent to Europe*

- Time away: never returned
- On the map: 18,200 km (at 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.

## VI. Zhou Daguan (周達觀)

*1296 – 1297 · member of an embassy to Angkor*

- Time away: a year and a half
- On the map: 6,900 km (at 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.

## VII. Zheng He (鄭和)

*1405 – 1433 · admiral, seven ocean voyages*

- Time away: 7 voyages in 28 years
- On the map: 20,800 km (at 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.

## Who got there first?

Six comparisons between a traveller from China and a European. Guess whether the European got there before or after.

1. **Calicut, India.** Zheng He's first fleet sets out for Calicut in 1405. Did Vasco da Gama reach Calicut before or after? *After: in 1498, 93 years after Zheng He's first fleet set out.*
2. **Samarkand.** Xuanzang passes through Samarkand around 630. Did Alexander the Great reach Samarkand before or after? *Before: he took the city in 329 BC, almost 960 years earlier.*
3. **Sri Lanka.** Faxian reaches Sri Lanka around 410. Did Marco Polo reach Sri Lanka before or after? *After: he called there around 1292, some 880 years later.*
4. **Pataliputra (Patna), India.** Faxian copies texts at Pataliputra around 405. Did Megasthenes, the Greek envoy to King Chandragupta's court, get there before or after? *Before: he died around 290 BC, so he was there some 700 years earlier.*
5. **Angkor, Cambodia.** Zhou Daguan reaches Angkor in 1296. Did the first European known to have seen Angkor arrive before or after? *After: the Portuguese friar António da Madalena, in 1586, 290 years later.*
6. **Rome and Beijing.** Bar Sauma, who left from Beijing, reaches Rome in 1287. Did Marco Polo, who left from Venice, reach China before or after? *Before: in 1275, 12 years earlier.*

## How far they went

Kilometres are measured on the map through the places the texts name, so each is a minimum. For Zheng He one route is counted, out to the farthest ports in his inscription, although he made seven voyages there and back.

| Traveller | Kilometres on the map, at least | Time |
| --- | ---: | --- |
| Faxian | 17,300 | about 14 years |
| Xuanzang | 17,800 | 16 years |
| Du Huan | not measured | 11 years |
| Changchun | 10,900 | 4 years |
| Rabban Bar Sauma | 18,200 | never returned |
| Zhou Daguan | 6,900 | a year and a half |
| Zheng He | 20,800 | 7 voyages in 28 years |

Six of the routes add up to more than 90,000 kilometres, more than twice the Earth's circumference at the Equator. Du Huan's route is not measured because its order is unknown.

## What did not happen

### Zheng He did not discover America.

In his 2002 book *1421*, Gavin Menzies claimed Chinese fleets sailed round the world and reached America. Historians found no evidence for it; in the *Journal of World History* Robert Finlay showed that the book's case rests on distorted sources and speculation.

### His ships were probably not 130 metres long.

The *History of Ming*, compiled only in 1739, gives the treasure ships a length of 44 *zhang*, between 117 and 134 metres depending on how the unit is converted. Many historians and naval engineers doubt a wooden ship that size could have survived the ocean and put the largest at around 60 to 75 metres. That is why the Zheng He chapter uses the numbers in his own inscription.

### Xuanzang had no monkey.

The monkey king, the pig and the demon monk who guard him in *Journey to the West* are fictional characters from a novel printed more than 900 years after his death. The real journey, through the desert, alone and without water, is in the biography written by his disciple.

## Sources and method

Each chapter rests on the text written by the traveller or someone close to him, read in public-domain English translations from the 19th and 20th centuries or directly in Chinese. The quotations from Du Huan, Zhou Daguan and Zheng He's inscription are translated from the Chinese for this page.

The routes are drawn through the places named in those texts, on a Natural Earth map. Intermediate points at sea or in passes keep the line on water or in a valley and make no claim about the route. Distances are measured over the Earth's surface between those points and rounded down to the hundred kilometres.

### Faxian

- [Faxian, *A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms*, tr. James Legge, Oxford, 1886 (Project Gutenberg)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2124)
- [法顯, 《佛國記》 (Wikisource, Chinese)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%BD%9B%E5%9C%8B%E8%A8%98)

### Xuanzang

- [Hui Li, *The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang*, tr. Samuel Beal, London, 1911 (Internet Archive)](https://archive.org/details/lifeofhiuentsian030569mbp)
- [Xuanzang, *Si-yu-ki. Buddhist Records of the Western World*, tr. Samuel Beal, London, 1884 (Internet Archive)](https://archive.org/details/siyukibuddhistre01hsuoft)
- [UNESCO, Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/208/)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, *Journey to the West*](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Journey-to-the-West)

### Du Huan

- [杜佑, 《通典》, juan 191 and 193 (Wikisource, Chinese)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%80%9A%E5%85%B8/%E5%8D%B7193)
- [Wikipedia, *Jingxingji*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingxingji)
- [Wikipedia, *Tongdian*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongdian)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Baghdad](https://www.britannica.com/place/Baghdad)

### Changchun

- [Li Zhichang, Changchun's *Si yu ki*, in E. Bretschneider, *Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources*, vol. 1, London, 1888 (Internet Archive)](https://archive.org/details/india.history.resource.88434)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Battle of the Kalka River](https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-the-Kalka-River)

### Rabban Bar Sauma

- [E. A. Wallis Budge, *The Monks of Kûblâi Khân, Emperor of China*, London, 1928 (Internet Archive)](https://archive.org/details/monksofkublaikha0000eawa)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Marco Polo](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marco-Polo)

### Zhou Daguan

- [周達觀, 《真臘風土記》 (Wikisource, Chinese)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E7%9C%9F%E8%87%98%E9%A2%A8%E5%9C%9F%E8%A8%98)
- [Wikipedia, *The Customs of Cambodia*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Customs_of_Cambodia)
- [Wikipedia, António da Madalena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_da_Madalena)

### Zheng He

- [鄭和 et al., 《天妃之神靈應記》, the Changle inscription, 1431 (Wikisource, Chinese)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E5%A6%83%E4%B9%8B%E7%A5%9E%E9%9D%88%E6%87%89%E8%A8%98)
- [鄭和 et al., 《婁東劉家港天妃宮石刻通番事蹟記》, the Liujiagang inscription, 1431 (Wikisource, Chinese)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%A9%81%E6%9D%B1%E5%8A%89%E5%AE%B6%E6%B8%AF%E5%A4%A9%E5%A6%83%E5%AE%AE%E7%9F%B3%E5%88%BB%E9%80%9A%E7%95%AA%E4%BA%8B%E8%B9%9F%E8%A8%98)
- [Wikipedia, Zheng He](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He)
- [Smithsonian Magazine, “The Peculiar Story of Giraffes in 1400s China”](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peculiar-story-giraffes-medieval-china-180963737/)
- [Wikipedia, Chinese treasure ship (dimensions and estimates)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship)
- [*A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499*, tr. E. G. Ravenstein, London, 1898 (Project Gutenberg)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46440)
- [Robert Finlay, “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America”, *Journal of World History* 15:2, 2004](https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/9157)

### The “Who got there first?” game

- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Samarkand (Alexander the Great, 329 BC)](https://www.britannica.com/place/Samarkand-Uzbekistan)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Megasthenes](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Megasthenes)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vasco da Gama](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasco-da-Gama)

### The map

- [Natural Earth, 1:50m countries, lakes, rivers and geographic regions (public domain)](https://www.naturalearthdata.com/)

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A project by [Marius Comper](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/) · https://mariuscomper.uk/exploratori-chinezi/en/