Map of Literature
The authors’ homes, the works’ settings, the sites of legend — from Troy to Stratford, from Chang’an to Kyoto, many are real places. Tap a marker for the story, tap the legend to filter.
☜ Tap a marker and its story appears here.
Sites of Western Literature
Sites of Chinese Literature
Sites of World Literature
The places that cannot be mapped: the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, the Grand View Garden, the giants of La Mancha’s castle — literature deliberately sets them on the border of the real and the imagined. The coastline data is shared with "History of Technology" (Natural Earth, longitude -130° to 145°, latitude 10° to 72°), covering the Mediterranean, Western Europe, China, Japan, India, and Persia; place coordinates use standard historical and literary identifications.
Places on this map
Troy
The stage of Homer’s Iliad. The wrath of Achilles, the death of Hector, the sack by the wooden horse — all played out at this citadel on the northwest corner of Asia Minor. In 1871, Schliemann’s spade dug this city, long thought to exist only in verse, up out of the ground.
Connected figures: Homer
Florence
Dante’s home, and the city that exiled him for life, never to return. It was in his wandering exile that he wrote the Divine Comedy, raising the Florentine dialect from a "vernacular" into a literary language and all but single-handedly founding modern Italian.
Connected figures: Dante
Stratford
Shakespeare’s birthplace and resting place. From this small English town he went to the theaters of London, wrote Hamlet and King Lear, and four hundred years later returned here to the earth. Today the town exists almost entirely on this one name.
Connected figures: Shakespeare · Hamlet
La Mancha
The setting of Don Quixote. It was on this dry plateau of central Spain that the country gentleman, driven mad by chivalric romances, took the windmills for giants, leveled his lance, and charged. Cervantes made this barren land the most famous battlefield of idealism.
Connected figures: Cervantes · Don Quixote
Weimar
Where Goethe lived, wrote, and held office for the second half of his life. In this small German city he completed most of Faust, making Weimar a holy place of German literature — a small town bearing, through one man, the literary weight of a whole nation.
Connected figures: Goethe
Lesbos
The Aegean island where Sappho lived. Twenty-six centuries ago this woman poet, honored by the ancients as the "Tenth Muse," wrote here the earliest personal lyric verse. Her name and this island have since given rise to particular cultural meanings in the West, current to this day.
Connected figures: Sappho
Chang’an
The Tang capital, and where Xuanzang set out on his pilgrimage west for scriptures. The historical Xuanzang went from here to India alone for seventeen years; in Journey to the West this journey is rewritten as four traveling together, subduing demons all the way. Chang’an is the fork of the real and the fictional.
Connected figures: Xuanzang
Huai’an
The generally accepted home of Wu Cheng’en, author of Journey to the West. In this small town on the Huai River, he fused the god-and-demon legends of centuries of folklore with the history of Xuanzang’s pilgrimage into the immortal tale of Sun Wukong’s havoc in Heaven and the westward journey of master and disciples.
Connected figures: Wu Cheng’en · Sun Wukong
Jinling (Nanjing)
The backdrop of Dream of the Red Chamber, bound up with the rise and fall of Cao Xueqin’s own family. The Caos once flourished here, and here were confiscated and ruined. That lived experience of splendor and collapse is the ground-tone of the Jia household’s decline in the novel.
Connected figures: Cao Xueqin · Jia Baoyu · Lin Daiyu
Chengdu
Where Du Fu took refuge from the chaos in his later years. In the western suburbs of Chengdu he put up a thatched hut (today the "Du Fu Thatched Cottage"), and in poverty and sickness wrote a great store of poems — including "My Thatched Hut Wrecked by the Autumn Wind," whose roof was torn off yet whose heart went out to all the world’s cold scholars.
Connected figures: Du Fu
Huangzhou
Where Su Shi was banished. It was in this trough of his life that he opened up the eastern slope, styled himself "Dongpo the Recluse," and wrote the Red Cliff rhapsodies and "the great river flows east." Adversity, in fact, made his most serene and greatest works — Huangzhou is where Su Dongpo was truly born.
Connected figures: Su Shi
Caishiji
A scenic spot on the Yangtze, bound up with the legend of the "Immortal Poet" Li Bai. He is said to have drowned here reaching drunk for the moon in the water — true or not, this romantic-to-the-end ending fits a poet who wrote the passion of the High Tang to its very limit.
Connected figures: Li Bai
Kyoto
The capital of Heian-period Japan, the court world in which Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji. Deep in the palace of this thousand-year-old capital, a lady-in-waiting produced one of the earliest full-length novels in world literary history, and set the keynote of Japan’s "mono no aware" aesthetics.
Connected figures: Murasaki Shikibu
Baghdad
The city of One Thousand and One Nights. In this flourishing capital of the Arab empire, Scheherazade told the king stories night after night, buying with suspense one tomorrow after another. Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba all flowed from here out into the world.
Connected figures: Scheherazade
Nishapur
The home of the Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam. In this Silk Road hub he wrote the seize-the-day quatrains of the Rubáiyát in one hand while, in the other, directing a reform of the calendar and studying algebra — poetry and science never at odds in him.
Connected figures: Omar Khayyam
Ayodhya
The homeland of Rama in the Indian epic the Ramayana. On this land the legendary author Valmiki wrote the tale of Rama’s exile and rescue of his wife into a Sanskrit epic that, for over two thousand years, has deeply shaped Indian religion, morality, and literature.
Connected figures: Valmiki