Time traveller in China

In the annals of archaeology there is nothing to match the dogged industry of Alexander Cunningham of the Royal Engineers, who for more than half a century (1834 to 1885) criss-crossed northern India uncovering that sub-continent's lost history, much of it relating to the country's long-forgotten Buddhist past.

Time and again, his digs revealed buried cities and sites hitherto considered legendary, most notably a score of places associated with the life and death of the philosopher-saint known to millions in Asia as Buddha Sakyamuni, the sage of the Sakya clan.

What made this extraordinary achievement possible, besides determination and good health, were the two guidebooks Cunningham used to plot his way - one 1,200 years old, the other 1,400. Both were the works of Chinese monks who had travelled to India in search of Buddhist scriptures: the pioneer Fa Hian (today written Faxian) and the scholar Hsuan Tsang (Xuanzang).

Ten Thousand Miles Without A Cloud tells the story of Xuanzang, who slipped out through the great Western Gate of Chang'an (now Xian, best known in the West for its army of terracotta warriors) in the year 627 in defiance of the emperor's orders and returned 18 years later to a hero's welcome.

He brought back not only scores of precious Sanskrit sutras but also wondrous tales of the Western Regions - the lands to the west and south of the Celestial Kingdom.

When first translated into English in Cunningham's time, Xuanzang's Record of the Western Regions transformed our knowledge of India's socalled Dark Ages - but Xuanzang in his own time also transformed China by encouraging the emperor T'ai Tsung (Taizong) to govern on Buddhist principles, leading to what many Chinese to this day (even, it seems, the Great Helmsman himself, Chairman Mao) think of as China's golden age.

This is the first biography of Xuanzang to appear in English since Arthur Waley's portrait half a century ago but it is much more than that, for it is both biography and autobiography: a tale of two lives and two journeys inextricably intertwined.

Ten Thousand Miles Without A Cloud is also the story of its author, Sun Shuyun, born in Mao's China in the early 1960s, the unwanted youngest daughter of an increasingly embittered and passed-over veteran of the People's Liberation Army.

Two sources of solace in her early life were her maternal grandmother, who to her father's constant worry was an unreconstructed Buddhist, and a comic strip of the popular Chinese epic The Monkey King (later popularised in the West by the TV series Monkey), the story of a monkey with magical powers who, together with a pig and a novice, accompany a bumbling monk as he journeys in search of sacred writings.

Only much later, after several liberating years at Beijing University studying English, followed by a scholarship to Oxford, did Sun Shuyun learn that The Monkey King was based on a real monk and a real journey. Later still, she fell in love with, and married, a Westerner, settled in London and became a documentary filmmaker. Then she set out to discover Xuanzang for herself by retracing his travels, beginning and ending in Xian and taking in on the way large stages of the Silk Road, the mountains of Tienshan, the Taklamakan Desert, Kyrgyztan, Pakistan and India.