ABSTRACT
The Kathmandu Valley is a roughly circular bowl about twenty-five kilometres in diameter set high in the Himalayan foothills. The rich black soil of the valley, and its strategic position on ancient trade routes between Tibet and India, meant that it became an outpost of South Asian civilisation from the fourth century Ce onwards. The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan Tsang (Xuan Zang), passing through the plains of India in the early seventh century, heard that the Valley possessed both Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries close together, and that there were ‘about 2,000 [Buddhist] monks who study both the Great and the Little Vehicle’. Numerous inscriptions in elegant Sanskrit and many beautiful sculptures, still today sited in temple compounds or in wayside shrines, attest to the high level of culture attained in the Licchavi period (fifth to ninth centuries Ce).
