A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.50.2

c6.50.2

641-2) and has left behind interesting observations on the religious and social conditions that prevailed in these lands in his day; but even he does not completely satisfy the curiosity of modern students, and it has been said of him: ‘He was not a good observer, a careful investigator, or a satisfactory recorder, and consequently he left very much untold which he would have done well to tell.’ I-tsing who spent many years in India in the last quarter of the seventh century did not visit South India and has nothing directly to tell us about it. But his works are valuable for the itineraries they contain, for their notices of differences in doctrine and practice among the Buddhists of different lands and, above all, for the brief biographies of about sixty eminent monks who visited India at the same time as he. There are records in the Chinese annals of embassies exchanged between China and the Pallava court of Kāñchi in the eighth century and the Chola court in the eleventh. A fair amount of trade was carried on between China and South India in the following centuries and Chinese junks visited Indian waters pretty freely. The great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan sent a number of embassies to South Indian states and some of them even sought to influence the course of local politics; with what results we are not in a position to judge.