Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms

Faxian was a Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled overland from China to India between 399 and 414 in search of Buddhist texts. He crossed the deserts and oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin and described roads, monasteries and religious communities along the way. The card lists James Legge's English translation as a University of Washington selection, and notes that the full text remains to be added. The atlas does not hold the text of this edition: no copy was harvested into the corpus, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Eyewitness

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded, and the word is not expected here. This is a fifth-century pilgrim's record, centuries before the name Tartar was used for the Mongols.

Why read it

It is an eyewitness picture of the desert roads and Buddhist oasis kingdoms of the early fifth century, well before the steppe empires that later carried the name Tartary.

Watch out

Faxian writes as a pilgrim, so he notes monasteries and holy sites more than towns or trade. The catalogue entry is a selection, not the whole book.