Retreading ancient steps

For Chinese writer A Yi, one of the judges of the project, Liu and Bai are "contemporary versions of Xuanzang".

In the seventh century, Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk who lived during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), spent 17 years traveling to India to bring original Buddhist texts and authentic interpretations back to China, contributing greatly to not only the introduction and translation of Buddhism, but communication between cultures. He recorded his travel in The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions.

"Like Xuanzang did in India, Liu and Bai went to Central Asia and the Balkans, bringing back information and culture from those regions," he says. "Liu's work, for instance, is a successful example for Chinese travel writers and will exert a long-lasting influence."

Central Asia and the Balkans are regions often overlooked by many tourists, which is also one reason that proposals from Bai and Liu stood out.

"We, living in China, are conscious of life only here, or in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia, regions that mainstream tourists can reach. We think we know about the world, but the world is much larger than we imagine," Wu says.

"For instance, we don't know much about Central Asia or the region of former Yugoslavia. By traveling, or reading other people's travelogues, we can get a more complete image of the globe, and we'll know that lives in the world are diversified. We shouldn't indulge our self-centered tendencies, which is something that can often happen in today's China, Europe and the US," Wu says.

"The winning destinations are all difficult to reach. We want to make it difficult," he says.

In 2010, Liu, still a journalist, was on a business trip to Horgos in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. He saw trucks in a long line waiting for customs clearance and the magnificent Tianshan Mountains from afar. In awe, Liu says, he wanted to see the world beyond the snow-capped mountains.

He went to his first stop, Uzbekistan, in the autumn of 2011. Since 2016, he has traveled in Central Asia for his new book. In 2018, he used the funding to pay for his travels to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. His book Among the Stans: A Central Asian Journey was recently published.

The One-Way Street special issue includes Liu's Pamir Highway and Wakhan Valley, an essay based on his one-month journey in Tajikistan, where he traveled from Dushanbe to the Kulma Pass along the Panj River.

He says he was so excited to walk on a stretch of path that Xuanzang traveled about 1,300 years ago. "Few Chinese people have traveled to that place and written anything about it, so it became an important achievement for me," he says.

Across the Panj River lies Afghanistan. "The river is the boundary between the two countries, but it is just a naturally-formed river. The boundary is imposed on people who actually are of the same Wakhan ethnicity, and relatives who used to visit each other, but now they have different lives, currencies and nationalities," he says.