Description: A map of Asia showing the route of the Buddhist Yuan Chwang's route from China to India, from AD 629 to 645. "In the year 629, the year after the arrival of Muhammad's envoys at Canton and thirty odd years after the landing of Pope Gregory's missionaries in England, a certain learned and devout Buddhist named Yuan Chwang started out from Sian–fu, Tai–tsung's capital, upon a great journey to India. He was away sixteen years, he returned in 645, and he wrote an account of his travels which is treasured as a Chinese classic. [...] His journey was an enormous one. He went and came back by way of the Pamirs. He went by the northern route, crossing the desert of Gobi, passing along the southern slopes of the Thien Shan, skirting the deep blue lake of Issik Kul, and so to Tashkend and Samarkand, and then more or less in the footsteps of Alexander the Great southward to the Khyber Pass and Peshawar. He returned by the southern route, crossing the Pamirs from Afghanistan to Kashgar, and so along the line of retreat the Yue–Chi had followed in the reverse direction seven centuries before, and by Yarkand, along the slopes of the Kuen Lun to rejoin his former route near the desert end of the Great Wall. Each route involved some hard mountaineering. His journeyings in India are untraceable; he was there fourteen years, and he went all over the peninsula from Nepal to Ceylon." — Wells, 1921, pp. 561-562.
Place Names: Miscellaneous Asia, India, China, Tibe
ISO Topic Categories: location,
oceans,
inlandWaters,
transportation,
structure
Keywords: Yuan Chwang's Route from China to India, physical, transportation, physical features, roads, location,
oceans,
inlandWaters,
transportation,
structure, Unknown, 629–645 AD
Source: H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1921) 562
Map Credit: Courtesy the private collection of Roy Winkelman |
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