Great Tang Records on the Western Regions
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A monk who walked to India and spent sixteen years there reports back on more than a hundred kingdoms with a precision that has let archaeologists locate sites from his directions alone.
- systematic reporting of a hundred and more polities with distances and customs
- a foreign observer supplying detail the local record does not preserve
- archaeological sites later identified from the itinerary
- translation standards raised by direct access to the originals
Xuanzang left China against an imperial ban, crossed Central Asia, studied at Nalanda, and returned with hundreds of Sanskrit manuscripts and relics. The Records, compiled at imperial request, describe each region's extent, climate, script, currency, customs, rulers and Buddhist establishments, with distances and directions. Because Indian sources of the period rarely record such detail, the work is a principal witness for seventh-century Indian geography and monastic life, and excavations at Nalanda and elsewhere have been guided by it. His translation programme afterwards set a new standard of fidelity to the Sanskrit.
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