A Silk Road pilgrim six centuries before Marco Polo

Around 629 CE, in the early years of the Tang dynasty, the Chinese monk Xuanzang set out across the deserts and mountain passes of Central Asia toward India — and he is recorded as having left against an imperial travel ban. He followed Silk Road routes that the Venetian traveler Marco Polo would cross in the opposite direction, toward China, more than six hundred years later.

One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.