Journeva
In 1993 robbers broke into a tomb in China, but they left the bamboo, and on it was the oldest copy of a book with one of the world's best-known lines.
So it's October 1993, in China. People open a small tomb near Jingmen. Inside, there are thin strips of bamboo with old writing.
The strips are part of a very old book, the Laozi. Nobody knows for sure who the writer is.
The book has a famous line. A trip of a thousand li starts with one step. A li is about half a kilometre.
The road is long, but the step is small. So take one small step today.
Every Journeva story exists at four levels — same plot, same characters, richer language each step. Here is how this one begins at each level.
In the app you can tap any word for its meaning, listen to the story read aloud with the words lighting up, and save words to practise later. Ten stories are free at every level, and every story is free at A1.
Get Journeva on the App StoreRead it in a language you already know to check your understanding — every Journeva story is written in all five.
In October 1928 Virginia Woolf told the women students of Cambridge what a writer needs, and her answer still fits in one line.
In about 261 BC an Indian king won a war, counted the dead and stopped, and a line in a very old Buddhist book says what he had understood.
A physics student in London starts a doctorate in 1970, his band gets in the way for thirty-seven years, and Plato explains why the guitar was never a detour.