which hopefully will help me to leverage my little dissertation, should i ever get it done. most of the chinese travel accounts and geographies aren't translated. of the books that i'm working with, the 13th century zhufan zhi, a geography of the south seas (albeit not a travel account, he talked to a bunch of arab and chinese merchants for the details) by zhao rugua was translated by hirth and rockwell in 1911, although it's long out of print, paul pelliot translated zhou daguan's zhenla fengtu ji, a 14th century embassy record to cambodia, into french, and zhou qufei's lingwai daida12th century geography of south china and the south seas, was translated into german. beyond that, zheng he's 15th century voyages all over southeast asia, india and east africa have been the topic of more aattention, with edward dryer's zheng he: china and the oceans in the early ming dynasty, 1405-1433 being the most credible of the lot (don't get me started on gavin menzies).

as for wang dayuan, he claims to have actually visited all the places that he lists in the daoyi zhilue [geography of island barbarians], but his accounts of many places appear to crib from earlier geographies, so it's hard to tell if he personally went there (in a manner similar to marco polo, actually), but clearly he had access to people that did. lots of merchants going back and forth between china and southeast asia and india, probably less getting all the way into the mediterranean.