China's past in the present

Book review of Gazing Eastwards: Of Buddhists Monks and Revolutionaries in China

This book by the well-known historian Romila Thapar is a record of her travels and work in China in 1957, unmediated by hindsight and, therefore, evoking a past that comes sharply alive. She was in China for only a couple of months, undertaking field studies at two of the country’s outstanding Buddhist sites, Maijishan and Dunhuang. But her book is not about art history as much as about the country and the people she encounters during her travels. She feels comfortable in her relationships with individual and ordinary Chinese, even a strong affinity, and yet, as she observes, India and