Researching the Story
Journey to the West is one of China's most celebrated literary masterpieces, spanning 100 chapters and over 2,000 pages. The novel features hundreds of characters, from legendary heroes and deities to mythical creatures and ordinary people. To navigate this epic, I relied on several key resources throughout the project.
I drew on two English translations. W.J.F. Jenner's version (2001) is the more accessible of the two. It skips the complex religious and philosophical passages and stays focused on adventure and humor. If you're new to Chinese literature or want to enjoy the story without footnotes, this is the one to start with. It reads like a fantasy novel full of colorful characters and dramatic battles.
Anthony C. Yu's translation (2012 revised edition) is for those who want the full picture. It keeps the original poetry, includes extensive notes, and explains the story's religious background in depth, particularly the Buddhist and Daoist ideas central to the journey. It's slower going, but dense with meaning for anyone approaching the novel academically.
Irwen Wong's Journey to the West Library is an invaluable reference for chapter-by-chapter summaries. It breaks the story down clearly, with quick explanations of what's happening and who's involved. Well-organized and consistently useful, whether you're studying the novel or reading for pleasure.
With hundreds of religious figures, mythical beings, and legendary animals appearing throughout the novel, keeping track of the cast is its own challenge. Wikipedia's "List of Journey to the West characters" is reliable for that. It covers major and minor characters and links out to their backgrounds.
There were also moments when the English translations left details unclear. Xah Lee's "Monkey King" webpage contains the full original Chinese text of Journey to the West, not a summary or a retelling, just the novel as written centuries ago. It's useful for native speakers, Chinese literature students, or anyone doing a close comparison with the English.
- Wu, C. (2001). Journey to the West (W. J. F. Jenner, Trans.). Foreign Languages Press. (Original work published ca. 16th century)
- Wu, C. (2012). Journey to the West (A. C. Yu, Trans.; Rev. ed.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published ca. 16th century)
- Wong, I. (n.d.). Journey to the West novel summary. Journey to the West Library. Retrieved June 19, 2025.
- Lee, X. (n.d.). Monkey King: The Journey to the West. Retrieved June 19, 2025.
- Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). List of Journey to the West characters. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 19, 2025.
- Fo Guang Shan 佛光山. (2013-2025). Journey to the West. Chinese Notes. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Retrieved June 19, 2025.
Turning the Narrative into Visualization
Reading Journey to the West is already an adventure, but I became particularly interested in how to visualize the story's structure: the characters, the chapters, and how everything unfolds over time. Given how sprawling and episodic the novel is, I wanted a way to read the shape of the journey at a glance, especially for anyone who might feel lost across 100 chapters.
The initial inspiration was xkcd's hand-drawn movie narrative chart (Munroe, 2009). If you've seen it, you'll recognize how it traces each character's path across the timeline of a film like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. It's spare, precise, and surprisingly expressive for a set of squiggly lines. What it captures best is the shape of the story, the thing you feel while watching a film but rarely see drawn out.
There have been several attempts to programmatically generate xkcd-style narrative charts. ABC News created an interactive D3 layout narrative, while iStoryline (Liu et al., 2019) took things further by developing a semi-automatic tool that supports both manual curation and a rich set of annotations and visual cues to clarify character arcs and story structure.
The scale of this project, though, is larger than most visual storytelling examples. Mapping 100 chapters while staying faithful to the source and keeping the structure intact meant I couldn't rely on a one-off diagram or manually curated layout. I needed a consistent, repeatable approach that could handle not just a few scenes, but an entire epic. That meant building reliable methods to extract chapter summaries, identify character appearances, and keep everything readable across a long scroll.
The volume of text also pushed me away from horizontal layouts like xkcd's original. They're visually elegant, but they don't accommodate long excerpts or dense annotation well. Shifting to a vertical layout gave more room for detail while preserving that sense of forward movement through the story.
The result isn't a simplification of the novel; it's a reframing. All 100 chapters remain intact, the original structure is honored, and the goal is to help readers see the flow of the journey, not just read about it. That takes a lot of work and many design decisions, but the aim is to offer a different kind of clarity to a very old story.
- Munroe, R. (2009). xkcd: Hand-drawn movie narrative chart [Webcomic]. xkcd.
- ABC News. (n.d.). D3 layout narrative. ABC News Interactive. Retrieved June 19, 2025.
- Liu, S., Cui, W., Wu, Y., Wang, S., & Qu, H. (2019). iStoryline: Effective convergence to hand-drawn storylines. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 25(1), 769–778. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2865191