This story appears in the June 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine. The human skeletons were piled up like signposts in the sand. For Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk traveling the Silk Road in A ...

Xuanzang traveled along what we now know as the Silk Road. He survived the dangerous Taklamakan Desert and continued through the high and harsh mountains of Tian Shan (literally, mountains of the ...

Was the Silk Road ever a coherent path? The term was coined by a German ... Even such Chinese travelers as Xuanzang traveled for the purpose of bringing back foreign influences to China, and not the ...

He survived, though stripped of his fine robes. Xuanzang, a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk, walked thousands of miles of the Silk Road, crossing the Hindu Kush where few modern climbers dare.