CHIU CHU-CHI (1174)

Taoist monk and alchemist who journeyed from China across the heartland of Asia to visit Genghis Khan, the famed Mongol conqueror, at his encampment north of the Hindu Kush mountains.

The narrative of Ch´ang-ch´un´s (Chiu Chu-Chi´s) expedition, written by his disciple-companion Li Chilh-chang, presents faithful and vivid representations of the landscape and human settlement between the Great Wall of China and Kabul, Afganistán, and between the Yellow Sea and the Aral Sea.

Ch´ang-ch´un was a member of a Taoist sect known for extreme asceticism and for the doctrine of hsing-ming, which held that man´s "natural state" had been lost but could be recovered through prescribed practices. In 1188 he was invited to give religious instructions to the Chin dynasty emperor Shih Tsung, then reigning over northern China.

In 1215 the Mongols captured Peking and in 1219 Genghis Khan sent for Chiu Chu-Chi. He went first to Peking and having also received an invitation from the Khan´s younger brother Tamuga, who lived in northeastern Mongolia, he crossed the Gobi Desert and visited Tamuga´s camp near Buir Nor. Chiu Chu-Chi arrived in Samarkand, now in the Uzbek, in midwinter (1221-22) and reached the Khan´s Hindu Kush mountain camp in the spring. He returned to Peking in 1224. The account of the journey, Hsi Yu Chi, appeared in an annotated English translation, The Travels of an Alchemist (1931) by Arthur Waley.