Sven Hedin · 1925 · overland

Sven Hedin's own account, published in 1925 and covering forty years of Central Asian exploration. He found the buried city of Loulan, mapped the Transhimalaya, and was right about the wandering lake of Lop Nor when nobody believed him - and then backed Germany in both wars and lost the rest.

1. 1
   Stockholm

   A Swedish schoolboy who watched Nordenskiold's return from the Northeast Passage in 1880 and decided on the spot what he was going to do - and spent the next fifty years doing it.

2. 2
   Tehran

   Persia at twenty, as tutor to a Swedish family and then interpreter to an embassy - and the first long journeys, which taught him that he could ride for months and enjoy it.

3. 3
   Kashgar

   Chinese Turkestan, and the base for the expeditions - and in 1895 the crossing of the Taklamakan that killed most of his party and nearly killed him, described in one of the most harrowing chapters in travel writing.

4. 4
   Loulan

   A buried city found in the desert in 1900 when a workman went back for a lost spade and returned with carved wood - a Silk Road town abandoned sixteen hundred years earlier and preserved by the sand.

5. 5
   Lop Nor

   The wandering lake, which Hedin argued moved around its basin on a cycle of centuries as the Tarim shifted course - a theory nobody believed and which turned out to be right.

6. 6
   Northern Tibet

   The high plateau crossed repeatedly with pack animals that mostly died - Hedin mapping country that was blank on every chart, and doing it in disguise when the alternative was being turned back.

7. 7
   Shigatse

   The Tashilhunpo monastery and forty-four days as the guest of the Panchen Lama - the nearest he got to the thing he wanted most, which was Lhasa, and which he never reached.

8. 8
   Simla

   British India, and Curzon - Hedin decorated by the Royal Geographical Society, knighted, feted across Europe, and then ruining all of it by backing Germany in two wars.

9. 9
   Stockholm

   Home, and the maps - which are the argument for him: the first accurate survey of the Transhimalaya, and a body of work that outlived the reputation he wrecked.