Old World Wandering

Arriving in Calcutta

Dung Beetles, Dancing to the Milky Way

David Gelernter, who worries about the prevalence of drivel online. What do another 149 smart people worry about?

A family outside their yurt in inner Mongolia, from Chinese families' worldly goods in Huang Qingjun's pictures

The nomadic Tuareg tend to live in the Saharan parts of Niger and Mali, as well as Nigeria. More striking photos of women in all their diversity from around the African continent.

Continue reading Songs of Shambala»

Old World Wandering is an experiment. It is a literary travelogue reinvented for the internet. Over the past year, we have travelled across Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, looking for connections: connections between past and present, between communities, and – most of all – between places. We believe that travel writing is about journeys, not destinations, about people, not a list of sites, and – at its heart – about the connections that bind us all together.

From Dunhuang: Three Days on the Silk Road

Gangnam Style's subversive message

India to build world's tallest statue

Above all, I had to consider whether travel writing was still a form that could adapt to this very changed world. With the book finished, and having read a lot of the more recent travel books produced by younger writers, I have not the slightest doubt that the genre has a great deal of life in it yet. For wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. It's possible to cross-fertilise the genre with other literary forms - biography, or anthropological writing - or, perhaps more interesting still, to follow in Chatwin's footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel.

Bsampeling Monastery in Sichuan, China 

Inmates outside a 1930s Shanghai opium detoxification clinic, from Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, a Foreign Policy slideshow

Lunch with Tibetan nomads

Nine Days with the Most Traveled Secretary of State in History

Dawn over a Tibetan village outside Shangri-La in Yunnan, China