This paper argues that key aspects of early modern European utopias originated in an Islamicate travelers’ folklore about East Asian political cultures. Utopias in early modern European literature have a number of relatively consistent features: being a place reached by travel and located in the antipodes; Utopia being introduced through a frame story; the utopian text taking the form of a dialog; Utopian society being a product of human reason, arranged in perfect geometric order, and often exemplifying middle-class values; and the presence of a native guide explaining Utopia to the narrator. While these features are present to a degree in some of the genre’s ancient influences such as Plato and Lucian, and in the Chinese utopia, “Peach Blossom Spring,” early modern European utopia was a product of its more immediate social and cultural context, especially the explosive growth of maritime exploration. A number of texts and stories in Islamicate literature lacking most of the features listed above have been analyzed as utopias, including Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and the Land of the Virtuous in the Alexander tradition; these texts can be classified as independent instances of utopia as a transcultural category. On the other hand, the features of Utopia described above are present in texts that are not utopias in the traditional sense, that is, fictional portrayals of an ideal form of society achievable by human effort. This latter category includes descriptions of East Asia in Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s 9th c. Akhbar al-Sin wa’l-Hind and ‘Ali Akbar Khatayi’s Book of China (Khataynamah) (922/1516), and the kingdom of Bisila in the early 12th c. Kushnamah. While certain features, such as the dialog form, have been the focus of analysis of early modern European utopias as literary works, they also grounded in experiences and practices of travel. In this sense, More’s Utopia and Campanella’s City of the Sun have closer kinship to the writings of Marco Polo and Sirafi than to the Platonic dialogues. The depiction of Bisila in the Kushnameh has many of the formal features listed above, while the Book of China strongly resembles utopian aspects of later European descriptions of China that have been attributed to the influence of More. This utopian modality in Islamicate writing on China thus represents a feature of medieval and early modern political reportage and other political communication with potentially great importance for our understanding of Islamicate political and cultural history.