You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
There are many reasons why
individuals have travelled beyond their own societies. Some travellers may have simply
desired to satisfy curiosity about the larger world. Until recent times, however, travellers
did start their journey for reasons other than mere curiosity. While the travellers’
accounts give much valuable information on these foreign lands and provide a window for the
understanding of the local cultures and histories, they are also a mirror to the travellers
themselves, for these accounts help them to have a better understanding of themselves.
Records
of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel
accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the formation of
large, imperial states in the classical world, travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in many lands, and they held especially strong appeal for rulers desiring useful knowledge about their realms.
The Greek historian Herodotus reported on his travels in Egypt and Anatolia in researching
the history of the Persian wars. The Chinese envoy
Zhang Qian described much of central Asia as far west as Bactria (modern- day Afghanistan)
on the basis of travels undertaken in the first century BCE while searching for allies for the Han dynasty. Hellenistic and Roman
geographers such as Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder relied on their own travels
through much of the Mediterranean world as well as reports of other travellers to compile
vast compendia of geographical knowledge.
During the post-classical era (about 500 to 1500 CE), trade and pilgrimage emerged as major incentives for travel to foreign lands. Muslim merchants sought trading opportunities throughout much of the eastern hemisphere. They described lands, peoples, and commercial products of the Indian Ocean basin from East Africa to Indonesia, and they supplied the first written accounts of societies in sub-Saharan West Africa. While merchants set out in search of trade and profit, devout Muslims travelled as pilgrims to Mecca to make their hajj and visit the holy sites of Islam. Since the prophet Muhammad’s original pilgrimage to Mecca, untold millions of Muslims have followed his example, and thousands of hajj accounts have related their experiences. East Asian travellers were not quite so prominent as Muslims during the post-classical era, but they too followed many of the highways and sea lanes of the eastern hemisphere. Chinese merchants frequently visited South-East Asia and India, occasionally venturing even to East Africa, and devout East Asian Buddhists undertook distant pilgrimages. Between the 5th and 9th centuries CE, hundreds and possibly even thousands of Chinese Buddhists travelled to India to study with Buddhist teachers, collect sacred texts, and visit holy sites. Written accounts recorded the experiences of many pilgrims, such as Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing. Though not so numerous as the Chinese pilgrims, Buddhists from Japan, Korea, and other lands also ventured abroad in the interests of spiritual enlightenment.
Medieval Europeans did not hit the roads in such large
numbers as their Muslim and East Asian counterparts during the early part of the
post-classical era, although gradually increasing crowds of Christian pilgrims flowed
to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela (in northern Spain), and other sites. After
the 12th century, however, merchants, pilgrims, and missionaries from medieval Europe
travelled widely and left numerous travel accounts, of which Marco Polo’s description of
his travels and sojourn in China is the best known. As they became familiar with the
larger world of the eastern hemisphere - and the profitable commercial opportunities
that it offered - European peoples worked to find new and more direct routes to Asian
and African markets. Their efforts took them not only to all parts of the eastern
hemisphere, but eventually to the Americas and Oceania as well.
If Muslim and Chinese peoples dominated travel and travel writing in post- classical times, European explorers, conquerors, merchants, and missionaries took centre stage during the early modern era (about 1500 to 1800 CE). By no means did Muslim and Chinese travel come to a halt in early modern times. But European peoples ventured to the distant corners of the globe, and European printing presses churned out thousands of travel accounts that described foreign lands and peoples for a reading public with an apparently insatiable appetite for news about the larger world. The volume of travel literature was so great that several editors, including Giambattista Ramusio, Richard Hakluyt, Theodore de Biy, and Samuel Purchas, assembled numerous travel accounts and made them available in enormous published collections.
During the 19th century, European travellers made their
way to the interior regions of Africa and the Americas, generating a fresh round of
travel writing as they did so. Meanwhile, European colonial administrators devoted
numerous writings to the societies of their colonial subjects, particularly in Asian
and African colonies they established. By
mid-century, attention was flowing also in the other direction. Painfully aware of the
military and technological prowess of European and Euro-American societies, Asian
travellers in particular visited Europe and the United States in hopes of discovering
principles useful for the organisation of their
own societies. Among the most prominent of these travellers who made extensive use of
their overseas observations and experiences in their own writings were the Japanese
reformer Fukuzawa Yu- kichi and the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.
With the development of inexpensive and reliable means of
mass transport, the 20th century witnessed explosions both in the frequency of
long-distance travel and in the volume of travel writing. While a great deal of travel
took place for reasons of business, administration, diplomacy, pilgrimage, and
missionary work, as in ages past, increasingly effective modes of mass transport made
it possible for new kinds of travel to flourish. The most distinctive of them was mass
tourism, which emerged as a major form of consumption .for individuals living in the
world’s wealthy societies. Tourism enabled
consumers to get away from home to see the sights in Rome, take a cruise through the
Caribbean, walk the Great Wall of China, visit some wineries in Bordeaux, or go on
safari in Kenya. A peculiar variant of the travel account arose to meet the needs of
these tourists: the guidebook, which offered advice on food, lodging, shopping, local
customs, and all the sights that visitors should not miss seeing. Tourism has had a
massive economic impact throughout the world, but other new forms of travel have also
had considerable influence in contemporary times.