Life.Culture.Discovery.

Tales from Asia’s early travellers – suicidal slaves, drunk translators and decadent deaths

With contemporary tourism grounded, take a trip through some of history’s greatest Asian travel journals – Marco Polo’s excluded

Explore 1,300 years of trips through Asia with monks, explorers and writers from 14th century Morocco to 20th century Britain

Reading Time:6 minutes

Ibn Battuta in Egypt in the 14th century. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 7:00pm, 3 May 2020Updated: 11:56am, 2 Sep 2020

Never mind that Venetian fabulist Marco Polo, travellers have been coming to – and setting out from – Asia since time immemorial. Their names may not have been commemorated by a hotel chain or airline mileage programme, but where they ventured and what happened to them en route was rarely short of incredible.

And if not all of them rode a penny-farthing bicycle across the region (well done, Thomas Stevens, 1854-1935), in many ways their adventures were no less eccentric, enthralling or enchanting.

Instagram was “a thing” back in the 14th century, but you had to travel for 30 years and then dictate your memoirs to a scribe before you could post. That’s how it was for Ibn Battuta (aka IB), sometimes described as Morocco’s Marco Polo, who caught a serious dose of wanderlust on the way to Mecca and headed on to Asia before finally making it home, in 1354, having sidestepped an outbreak of something like coronavirus en route.

It was probably no surprise to IB’s publisher that his book, whose title can be summarised as “The Wonders of Travel”, was an instant hit, principally for its first-hand descriptions of places whose existence had previously been little more than rumour. And of course, eyewitness accounts of weird foreigners’ outlandish habits were a guaranteed parchment-turner.

While this sultan was sitting in the audience, a man put a knife to his own neck, delivered a speech, and then cut his own throat

Ibn Battuta

Following spicy anecdotes about crocodiles and cannibalism in Africa, IB had this to report from the Sultan of Java’s court: “While this sultan was sitting in the audience, a man put a knife to his own neck, delivered a speech, and then cut his own throat. The sultan said: ‘Does anyone do this in your country?’ I said not. He laughed and said: ‘These are our slaves, who kill themselves for love of us.’” IB noted that the dead man’s family was awarded a generous pension.