The Window Seat

The three on the cover

• Marco Polo

  1254–1324

  A Venetian merchant who spent twenty-four years on the roads between Venice and the court of Kublai Khan, and dictated the account of it from a Genoese prison cell. His book promises to set down things seen as seen and things heard as heard only, which is the oldest sourcing rule this project follows.

  Sail the Nile on a felucca at duskPolo went east by water like this for much of the way.

• Xuanzang

  602–664

  A Chinese Buddhist monk who left Tang China in 629 in defiance of an imperial ban on foreign travel, because the translations of scripture available to him contradicted each other. He walked to India, studied there for years, and came home in 645 with 657 Sanskrit texts on twenty packhorses.

  Take an overnight sleeper train and surrender the scheduleHe crossed northern India on foot; the same ground now takes a night.

• Anthony Bourdain

  1956–2018

  A New York cook who made his television out of eating what he was given and letting the people feeding him do the talking. His argument was simply to move, across an ocean or across a river, because eating someone's food is the shortest way into their life.

  Pull up a plastic stool for street-side phở at dawnHanoi's low plastic stools were his clearest argument, made at one.