Xu Xiake

On this day traveler and geographer Xu Xiake (徐霞客) was born (January 5, 1587 – March 8, 1641) in what is today Jiangyin (in Jiangsu province) . Xu traveled extensively on foot throughout China for more than 30 years and unusually most of his observations from these travels survived (The Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake). His work, later translated into modern Chinese by Ding Wenjiang, reads more like the accounts of a 20th-century field surveyor than an early 17th-century scholar. Like most travelers of the time, Xu was frequently robbed of all his belongings. Xu would depend on the kindness of local scholars and write histories of the local buddhist monasteries for payment of food and other supplies. Among his findings, was the true source of the West River in Guizhou. He also discovered the Mekong and Salween rivers were, in fact, separate drainages with completely separate watersheds. And most importantly, Xu discovered that the Jinsha river network – and not the Min or Yalong – formed the true headwaters of the Yangtze River, correcting a more than 1000-year-old mistake in Chinese geography compiled by Confucius in the “Classic of History”.

Date in History: 5 January 1587