Looking at the map (Fig. 3.7), can you identify a few mountain passes or desert areas that Xuanzang had to cross while travelling between China and India? HINDU KUSH TAKLAMAKAN DESERT GOBI DESERT PLATEAU OF TIBET H I M A L A Y A S ARABIAN SEA BAY OF BENGAL Tashkent Samarkand Kashgar Khotan Dunhuang

Two great deserts and two great mountain systems — and he crossed them by different routes going and coming back. Read the map with the legend: the red line is his journey from China and inside India, the blue line is his journey back to China. Barrier on the map Where on his route Gobi Desert Right at the start, leaving Xi’an — the red line runs along its southern edge Taklamakan Desert He skirted it on the north side going out (past Kashgar, towards Tashkent and Samarkand) and on the south side coming back (Khotan → Dunhuang → Xi’an) Hindu Kush Crossed between Central Asia and Bamiyan/Kabul — the gateway into the subcontinent from the northwest Himalayas The great wall along the whole northern edge of India. Notice he did not cross them head-on — he went around, through the northwest Plateau of Tibet Marked on the map between the Himalayas and China — another high barrier that his route avoids Why he went the long way round: the shortest line from Xi’an to Patna runs straight across Tibet and the Himalayas, and in the 7th century that was simply not passable with baggage. The practical route was the old Silk Route — around the Taklamakan, over the Hindu Kush, down through Bamiyan, Kabul and Taxila into the Indus plains. It is thousands of kilometres longer and it is the only way it could be done. Check it yourself: the map’s scale bar reads 0 – 250 – 500 km. Lay a strip of paper along the red line from Xi’an to Nalanda, mark it off against the scale, and you will see why th

NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 15 Xuanzang’s route from China to India and back (Fig. 3.7) — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 66 Updated on2026-09-19

Q1.

Looking at the map (Fig. 3.7), can you identify a few mountain passes or desert areas that Xuanzang had to cross while travelling between China and India?

Fig. 3.7, page 66 — Xuanzang’s route from China to India and back, redrawn at true latitude and longitude. (In this map the modern names of the cities he passed through are used, as in the book.)

Answer

Two great deserts and two great mountain systems — and he crossed them by different routes going and coming back. Read the map with the legend: the red line is his journey from China and inside India, the blue line is his journey back to China.

Barrier on the map	Where on his route
Gobi Desert	Right at the start, leaving Xi’an — the red line runs along its southern edge
Taklamakan Desert	He skirted it on the north side going out (past Kashgar, towards Tashkent and Samarkand) and on the south side coming back (Khotan → Dunhuang → Xi’an)
Hindu Kush	Crossed between Central Asia and Bamiyan/Kabul — the gateway into the subcontinent from the northwest
Himalayas	The great wall along the whole northern edge of India. Notice he did not cross them head-on — he went around, through the northwest
Plateau of Tibet	Marked on the map between the Himalayas and China — another high barrier that his route avoids

Why he went the long way round: the shortest line from Xi’an to Patna runs straight across Tibet and the Himalayas, and in the 7th century that was simply not passable with baggage. The practical route was the old Silk Route — around the Taklamakan, over the Hindu Kush, down through Bamiyan, Kabul and Taxila into the Indus plains. It is thousands of kilometres longer and it is the only way it could be done.

Check it yourself: the map’s scale bar reads 0 – 250 – 500 km. Lay a strip of paper along the red line from Xi’an to Nalanda, mark it off against the scale, and you will see why the journey took the years it did — he was in India from 630 to 644.

Q2.

Can you also identify a few important Buddhist centres of learning that Xuanzang visited in India? Do you know something of their significance?

Answer

Nālandā above all — and with it Taxila, Bamiyan, Mathura, Bodh Gaya, Lumbini, Amaravati and Kānchī. All of these are marked on Fig. 3.7 as cities he visited.

Centre	Why it mattered
Nālandā	The greatest monastic university of the age (Part 1, ‘The Gupta Era’). Xuanzang studied here. Harṣha and later the Pālas both patronised it; it drew students “sometimes from far away, even beyond India”.
Bodh Gaya	The place of the Buddha’s enlightenment — the single most sacred Buddhist site, and a chief reason for his journey.
Lumbini	The Buddha’s birthplace.
Taxila (Takṣhaśhilā)	An ancient centre of learning in the northwest, on the road from Central Asia into India.
Bamiyan	On the route through the Hindu Kush — a major Buddhist site outside India’s present borders, showing how far Buddhism had travelled.
Mathura, Prayagraj, Patna, Ayodhya, Kannauj	Great cities of the Ganga–Yamuna plain. He described Kānyakubja as beautiful and prosperous, and attended Harṣha’s assembly there.
Amaravati	A famous Buddhist stūpa site in the eastern Deccan.
Kānchī	In the Pallava kingdom, where he reported 100 Buddhist monasteries with 10,000 priests (figures the chapter says are likely exaggerated), plus 80 Hindu temples and many Jains.

Why his visit is so valuable to historians: Xuanzang was not writing to flatter a king. He was a student keeping notes, so he recorded “important details about politics, diplomacy, culture and religion in the kingdoms he crossed” — including things Indian records leave out, such as which cities were declining (Kauśhāmbī, Śhrāvastī) and which were thriving (Sthāneśhvara, Kānyakubja, Kāśhī). That is why the chapter calls his travelogue “a major source of information for historians of this period”.

Did you know? He carried back more than 600 Sanskrit manuscripts of Buddhist texts — “carried by 20 horses!” — and then spent his life translating them into Chinese.

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