Empire

In the 15th century, Admiral Zheng He, on the orders of the Emperor of China, embarked upon a series of extraordinary voyages of exploration. These voyages were undertaken in fleets of up to 300 colossal ships, with tens of thousands of men, at great cost to the court of the Ming dynasty. Initially they went all over South-East Asia and finished in India, but as time went on they went further afield, going to Arabia and even reaching East Africa on the seventh and final voyage...

India was the forgotten heart of the ancient world. For a millennium and a half, from about 250 BC to 1200 AD, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas, an ‘Indosphere’ where its influence was predominant. During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing recipient of a mass-transfer of Indian soft power...

Ruling in the 3rd century BC, Ashoka was one of India’s greatest ever rulers. Under his rule, the Mauryan Empire grew into the largest empire India had ever seen. Its capital, Pataliputra was a dazzling, glorious, cosmopolitan city that was eleven times larger than Athens. After a brutal conquest of the Kalinga kingdom, Ashoka suffered from intense guilt and turned to Buddhism as he now coveted peace...

In the 1st century AD, the nomadic Kushans settled in what is now Afghanistan and established settlements and trade. From here, they moved down over the Hindu Kush and took large sections of Northern India. Within their new kingdom, Buddhism flourished under the patronage of the ruling class. Before Kushan rule, the Buddha had never been represented as a human, only as a tree or an empty throne...

Buddhism reached China in the 1st century AD, yet it remained a minor, foreign religion for the next 100 years. It was not until the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 AD and the cracking of the classical Confucian order that Buddhism began to make headway in the Middle Kingdom. Over the following centuries, the religion took hold and so China both transformed Buddhism and was transformed by it. Yet, a monk named Xuanzang, born in 600 AD, was worried about Chinese Buddhism...

In late autumn, 629 AD, Xuanzang set out for the great university of Nalanda from Chang’an. Across the desert, over the Pamirs, and through multiple robberies, it was an epic journey. As he neared the Buddhist heartlands, he saw Buddhism in decline with its monasteries increasingly dilapidated, and he feared disappointment. However, after 6 years on the road he arrived at Nalanda and was awestruck by its splendour. In particular, he was blown away by the library...