"An excellent way to get students thinking about how cross-cultural contact changes over time is to read what travelers wrote in different eras. Anthony Barbieri-Low makes this easy for instructors by pairing accounts from travelers moving in opposite directions across Eurasia, to and from China. The book’s illustrations and maps further enrich comparison and should spark lively discussion." —Patricia Ebrey, University of Washington
"This book deftly juxtaposes pairs of travel accounts, one written by an Asian, often Chinese, traveler heading west and one by a European journeying east. The structure recalls Plutarch’s Lives, which pairs a Greek figure with a Roman one, and it succeeds brilliantly because the dialogue between the two sources brings out qualities in each that might otherwise remain unseen. Parallel Journeys will go a long way toward correcting the longstanding but mistaken belief that only Europeans traveled while others, including the Chinese, did not." —Valerie Hansen, Yale University
