ABSTRACT
A new and stridently evangelical religion needs, first and foremost, friends in high places to facilitate its diffusion and later to prevent its persecution. The Manichaean historiographical tradition was suffused with accounts of Mani's close friendship with a number of regional princes within the Sasanian Empire and above all with the Shahanshah himself. Manichaean missionaries who had the advantage of being Syriac-speakers and could cross over easily into the Roman Empire were already active in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire in the 240s. The site passed out of Manichaean use in the following century but two Buddhist monks with the religious names of Ruiyi and Guangkong took up residence in its ruins in the 1920s and established a popular Buddhist cult based on the statue of Mani the Buddha of Light which had miraculously survived pillaging and the passage of time.
