Customer Reviews

Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, AD 1-600 (Oxford India Collection)

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Xinru Liu's book contains important material that is difficult to find elsewhere and any student of the period will discover in it items of interest.

She examines the connections between Buddhist institutions and trade in some depth and her analysis of the influence of cultural values on long-distance trade is pertinent and fresh.

This is, however, in the end, a somewhat unsatisfactory and uneven work containing serious gaps.

For example, it makes almost no mention of the extensive maritime trade between India and China at this period or of the massive expansion of Indian influence into southern China through Jih-nan and Chiao-chih, in what is now northern Vietnam.

She also seems to be unaware of some major sources on the early trade between India and China. There is, for example, no mention at all of the 3rd century Wei-lueh, or of the detailed notes by the French scholar, Edouard Chavannes, to his pioneering translations of this work and the sections of the Hou Han shu dealing with the "Western Regions".