China is not an easy country to travel for someone who does not know the language. You cannot just arrive and decide day-by-day where and what to do. Why is that? – Very few people speak English – All the signs are in Chinese – Chinese people are 1.3 billion and it seems like most…

Here we are, less than a week left and then off we go! And so the time to pack has arrived… Jesuits in the XVII century packed very differently from us. They crossed deserted areas and camped in the middle of nowhere, They had to carry tents, supplies, tables, chairs and much more as they traveled…

Nǐ hǎo! Mandarin isn’t an easy language to learn usually, but with help from the Language Centre we will learn some basics to help navigate our way through the more rural areas of China. China has eight major dialects; Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fuzhou and Hokkien-Taiwanese. As Mandarin is the most widely spoken dialect, that is…

Who said traveling is easier today? Queuing now at the Visa Application Center with a folder full of documents and forms to get a tourist visa for China. The Jesuits needed no visa, their fame and reputation preceded them everywhere!

Here is the headquarters of the Jesuits’ order in the eternal city! It was within these walls that Kircher wrote the China Illustrata. Not a bad place to start our expedition to China, following in the footsteps of the Jesuits whom Kircher wrote about!

Our tickets to Beijing cost us a few hundred euros, ten minutes of our time and a couple of mouse clicks. It took about a decade for the first Jesuits to plan the outward trip from Rome to Bejin and one of them died in the meanwhile!

Dutch Jesuits traveled far and wide across not only China, but South America, Africa, Japan, North America and others, and with over 250,000 logs in the University closed stacks we were not short of routes to choose from. The Jesuits whose route we will follow are Albert d’Orville and Johann Grueber who traveled together from…

It is four weeks until we pack our bags, wave goodbye to Europe and begin our month in China. Already we have spent hours investigating where to go on our route, starting in Beijing and heading west towards Larung Gar and Tibet before returning east again to Shanghai. Figuring out our route was difficult enough even…