Prasenjit Duara, author of The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future:
This beautifully written 'travelogue' of Faxian's Record takes us on the text's journeys from Chang'an to Paris, thence from the French into Buriyati Mongol and into the Tibetan lands. Matthew King, who is as learned a polyglot as the writers he discusses, discloses the different cosmic pasts 'made anew from a history.'

Janet Gyatso, author of Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet:
Starting with Faxian's remarkable memoir of his trip from China to India in the fifth century CE to gather Buddhist teachings, this book takes the reader on a journey of journeys. Matthew King's ingenious 'circular' historiography tracks the travel of a Chinese Buddhist monk to the Buddha's birthplace; the journey of the memoir of that travel to European scholars in the nineteenth century; and then how the Orientalist scholarship that the memoir inspired made its way back to Siberia, Inner Asian scholars, and finally displaced Tibetan refugee scholars in northern India: all in service of delivering Buddhist Asia into the realm of knowledge. Replete with an expert English translation of the Tibetan translation of the Mongolian translation of the French translation of the original Chinese memoir (you get the idea), this masterfully conceived book will captivate Asianists and historians of knowledge alike.