Who was the warrior princess, Khutulun?
Genghis Khan was one of the bloodiest warrior generals in history. In the thirteenth century, his armies stormed out of the Asian steppe leaving a bloody smear across the map from Bokhara to Baghdad, the Black Sea to Buda-Pesth. He built an empire that dwarfed that of the Romans and the Abbasid Caliphate. He also […]
Who was the real John Blackthorne in Shogun?
The recent hit TV series, Shogun, is based on the eponymous novel by James Clavell. Its main character is a British explorer called John Blackthorne. Was there really such a man? In fact, yes. Shogun’s Blackthorne is based on the real-life navigator William Adams. He was the first Englishman to ever set foot in Japan. […]
What is the Silk Road?
In the steps of Marco Polo The Silk Road, as it is called, was an intricate network of trade routes linking Asia and the western world. It came into being with the expansion of the Han Empire into Central Asia around 100 BC. The Parthian Empire formed a land bridge to the Roman Empire and […]
Marco Polo: Epic adventurer or armchair traveller?
Marco Polo. His name has become a byword for epic adventure. The man who, in the 13th century, explored the Silk Road all the way to China. Or did he? There are historians who claim he simply wrote down gossip he heard from other merchants. Others have accused him of being an armchair traveller who never went further east than Persia. Some even question whether he ever left […]
Genghis Khan, but you can’t
Genghis Khan. His name is synonymous with brutality and ruthlessness. He was responsible for more deaths than Stalin and Hitler combined. His military campaigns sometimes involved eliminating an entire civilian population. 40 million people died because of him. Over two decades, that’s one person killed every twenty seconds. He hardly had time for lunch. His […]
Is Xanadu a real place?
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree’ The opening lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem Kubla Khan have led some to believe that Xanadu was an imaginary place. Coleridge himself said that the poem was composed after he experienced an opium-influenced dream. But there really was a place called Xanadu. More correctly […]
