Xuanzang (602–664) was a Chinese Buddhist monk who left China in 629 to study Buddhism at its source in India, returning to the Tang capital in 645 after sixteen years away. On his way he crossed the lands of present-day Afghanistan, and his book, the Datang Xiyu Ji (“Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang Dynasty”), is prized by historians and archaeologists for its precise detail.
At Balkh, capital of Tokharistan, he counted about a hundred Buddhist monasteries and some 3,000 monks, and described a splendid “new monastery” with gilded statues, later known in Arabic and Persian sources as Nawbahar. In Bamiyan he left an important description of the valley’s monuments and of the religious and social life of its people. Near Jalalabad he visited the great Buddhist centre of Hadda, where, he reported, thousands of monks lived in about a hundred monasteries.
Because his record is so exact, scholars still use it to identify and interpret ruined Buddhist sites across the region. His pilgrimage also passed into legend: it inspired the Chinese novel Journey to the West.