‘Imperial China’s Indiana Jones’: introducing Xu Xiake, one of the country’s first tourists

He was the archetypal happy wanderer, a trenchant and witty writer, and a scientist some way ahead of his time; more recently, he’s become a poster boy for Chinese tourism. Xu Xiake was one of a kind, not least because he spent three decades on the road four centuries ago.

He’s been called Imperial China’s Indiana Jones, but the moniker fails to do him justice. Born into a wealthy family of scholars in Jiangyin, west of Shanghai, in 1587, Xu was impelled by a curiosity bounded only by the borders of China, which during his lifetime was enjoying a period of relative prosperity under the Ming dynasty.

Although some details of his life are open to debate, his 600,000-word youji, or travelogue, which was eventually published in 1776, some 135 years after his death, is packed with a wealth of detail. Xu’s learning and keen powers of observation led him to comment knowledgeably on geography, hydrology, geology and botany.

Among other notable discoveries, he mapped the true source of the West River in Guizhou and was the first person to make a detailed study of limestone karst formations.

“Xu was a compulsive traveller and spent most of his life visiting what we would now call ‘beauty spots’ in China,” says Julian Ward, the author of Xu Xiake: The Art of Travel Writing. “He was very much a man of his times, and his concerns were perfectly in tune with the exuberant tastes of other late Ming literati.

“Examining Xu’s writing serves to underline the breadth of achievement of a man who utilised both traditional and contemporary Chinese poetic language in order to express an emotional response to the landscape through which he passed.”