The Chinese Travellers

Lesson 12 of 13 • 13 upvotes • 14:55mins

Abhyudaya Kelkar

There were some Chinese travellers who came to India in search of Buddhist texts and scriptures and perhaps pilgrimage. Some of them influenced China and the east very deeply. This trend began from the appearance of the Silk Road from China to the West via northern India. These travellers not only visited Fa-Hien came during the Gupta Period, while Song Yun, Huien Tsang and I-tsing, during the post-Gupta Period. Fa-Hien wrote mostly about the social conditions of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, as he called the Indian empire existing at that time, i.e. the Gupta Empire. Huien Tsang, a Chinese traveller came to India during his reign and wrote highly of Harsha and his reign as well as the socio-cultural and political conditions of India during that time. I-tsing, on the other hand, was the person through which we got most of the information we have about the ‘Indianized States’ of the south-eastern Asia, up to that period.