The Pleasure Seekers' Pauper Trail - William Dalrymple's "In Xanadu, A Quest"
Sometime in the 1600s, European travellers shifted from being explorers, pilgrims or merchants to travelling for pleasure. The 17th-century traveller Thomas Coryat was the first Englishman to visit Asia for pleasure, and he described visiting strange countries as the “queen of all pleasures in the world.” Coryat is a gawky backpacker mistaken by Emperor Jahangir for a Western sadhu; assuming the visiting mendicant needed no more, the emperor handed the penniless pleasure seeker a measly 100 rupees to return home. Pleasure seekers like Coryat might have helped establish trails of the popular kind. In the 1700s, wealthy Brits went on cross-Europe trips called the “Grand Tour.” In the era of carriages but no engines, they had little choice but to tread on choppy waters. Starting from the English Channel, they halted at French ports, visited the Alps and Switzerland, explored their artistic sides in Venice, Florence and Rome, and even paid the then newl...