The Desert: Over the course of several months, the Jesuits crossed an area of the Gobi Desert (which Kircher refers to as the Kalmak Desert). Kircher describes the Desert; “…They carried on across the Kalmak Desert of Tartary… the Desert is partly mountainous and partly flat covered with sand and gravel and entirely bare and infertile…” The…

Today, we explored the Gao Miao Temple in Zhongwei. Over time, this temple has catered to Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Today, the refurbished Buddhist architecture and deities outnumber the other faiths. In China Illustrata, Kircher has translated the ‘Compendium of the Divine Law’ into Chinese to propagate the Christian faith in China. The text includes…

Loyally following the route taken by Grueber and d’Orville, we are now crossing the remote and rural parts of the Chinese provinces rarely visited by foreigners. Our presence in the town has often raised astonishment and curiosity from the locals. Everyone, from children to adults, stared at us smiling and a bit puzzled and some asked to take…

Since we started traveling we have seen pagodas of all shapes and sizes almost everywhere. Kircher also noticed the numerous “towers”, as he calls them, spread everywhere in the country. The pagodas are defined as “ towers superstitiously built by the Chinese all with the same general structure and architecture (…) it has a shape of…

 We left our beloved Mongolia on a night train and headed towards the province of Ningxia. We arrived in the city of Yinchuan at 5 am after a long journey on interesting Chinese trains!     The founders of the old Tangut Kingdom chose this city as their capital as it is well placed between the…