The Wonders of Sir John Mandeville (Asia)
Last month we started our trip through The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and this week we’re going to finish! As before, Sir John Mandeville was an English knight who claimed to have traveled broadly in the mid-14th century. He reports soldiering in the service of the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo and for the Emperor […]
Stealing Tea From China
The British theft of tea from China in 1848-1851 ranks as one of the greatest acts of industrial espionage in history. It also makes a fresh, original RPG adventure. It’s not likely your players will have ever before stolen live plants from a foreign land! In the mid-19th century, England made enormous sums of money […]
The Dunhuang Manuscripts and the Mogao Caves
In the early 20th century, an itinerant Daoist priest in the deserts of western China discovered a treasure trove of medieval documents, hidden for a thousand years behind a false door in an abandoned Buddhist temple. The discovery would give historians a corpus of documents they still use to this day – and the discovery and […]