Travels to the West of Qiu Chang Chun
record of the journey embarked by the Taoist master Qiu Chuji who traveled from Shandong through Central Asia to present himself before Genghis Khan
The Travels to the West of Qiu Changchun (Chinese: 長春真人西遊記) was a record of the journey embarked by the Taoist master Qiu Chuji who traveled over 10,000 kilometers from Shandong through Central Asia to present himself before Genghis Khan.
In 1220, on the invitation of Genghis Khan with a tiger-head golden tablet (paiza), Qiu Chuji left his hometown in Shandong with eighteen disciples, and traveled north through Yanjing (present day Beijing). In June, they reached Dexing (德興; present-day Julu Hebei) and stayed in the Longyang Taoist Temple (龍陽觀) from summer to end of winter. On February 1221, they resumed their journey. When asked by friends and disciples when to expect the master to return, the master answered "In three years, three years". On February 3, they reached Cuiping Pass (翠帡口; west of Zhangjiakou), they saw the Taihang Mountains to their south. Travelling north then north east, they arrived at Gailipo salt lake (蓋里泊; now named Jiuliancheng Naoer 九連城淖爾; in the south of the Taibus Banner). From there they went to Lake Buir, Hulunbuir, Ulan Bator, Arkhangai, Altay Mountains, Beshbalik, Dzungaria, Samarkand and arrived at Hindu Kush of Afghanistan in 1222 and presented himself before Genghis Khan.
The journey to Central Asia and back took three years, from 1220 to 1224. The record was written by a disciple Li Zhichang (李志常), who accompanied Qiu on the journey.
“Travels to the West of Qiu Chang Chun” enters the record as record of the journey embarked by the Taoist master Qiu Chuji who traveled from Shandong through Central Asia to present himself before Genghis Khan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Travels, West and Chang can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q675455. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1220, 1221, 1222 and 1224.
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This entry incorporates text from “Travels to the West of Qiu Chang Chun” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.