Other Routes 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing

The collection includes pilgrimage accounts, which describe a 'national' circuit (as in Lady Nijo's, c. 1280, or Sei Shonagon's, c. 990, accounts) or move across vast regions to places of learning and pilgrimage or to a particular centre of religio-cultural significance (the early Chinese travellers to India in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, the Hajj pilgrimage of Ibn Jubayr in the 12th century, Blyden's Africanist-Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 19th century). These pilgrimage accounts can also taper into other genres: for instance, while ibn Battutah (b. 1304) set out to go to Mecca (which he did), he ended up travelling across 50 countries and dictating what is undoubtedly a travel book in a narrow generic sense rather than the account of a pilgrimage. Other extracts range from the influential medieval travel-geography of al-Idrisi in the 11th century; the global history,