ABSTRACT
The informed and educated reader will have recognized the context on which the title of this chapter draws: it is the often referred to and discussed scene from Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim in which the Tibetan lama visits the museum in Lahore, the Wonder House, and is confronted by the curator with the records of the Chinese Buddhist travellers. This chapter will consider the role and function of the so-called Chinese pilgrimage records in the reconstruction of Buddhist history in India. In a way, the chapter will argue, these records were part of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century activities of collecting – and constructing – historical knowledge and data which enabled early archaeologists in India like Alexander Cunningham or Aurel Stein to identify and locate Buddhist sites on the ground. The chapter will, as an example or case study, focus on Xuanzang’s description of “Greater Gandhāra” and the way it influenced the historical view of and the archaeological research in the region. The example will demonstrate that collecting as a social phenomenon is not restricted to artefacts but can also be observed, with a similar tendency of de-contextualization, in the case of the collection of textually preserved information which, in the case of the travelogues, becomes intrinsically interwoven with material culture and its interpretation.
