Tales of China that dazzled a king

Winds that threw a voyaging civil servant off course also blew him and his story into history

It took Choe Bu, a Korean living in the late 15th century, 135 days to make the trek from a tiny town on China's eastern coast to Beijing, capital of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and then back to his motherland.

The journey awed Choe's contemporaries, including the Korean king, who was so impressed that he decreed that a memoir of the feat immediately be committed to writing. The 50,000 words, written in Chinese and titled Journey Across the Sea, have in turn immortalized Choe's remarkable experience, for his generation and others that followed.