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Sri Lanka / China: A badly faded painting of the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian at the Pahiyangala Cave, Bulathsinghala, Kalutara District, where Faxian stayed for some months between 405 and 410 CE

Faxian (traditional Chinese: 法顯; simplified Chinese: 法显; pinyin: Fǎxiǎn; also romanized as Fa-Hien, Fa-hsien, Fa Xian) (337 – c. 422 CE) was a Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled by foot all the way from China to India, visiting many sacred Buddhist sites in what are now Xinjiang, China, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and between 399 and 412 to acquire Buddhist scriptures.

His journey is described in his important travelogue, 'A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Xian of his Travels in India and Ceylon in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline'.

On Faxian's way back to China, after a two-year stay in Ceylon, a violent storm drove his ship onto an island that was probably Java. After five months there, Faxian took another ship for southern China but, again, it was blown off course and they ended up landed at Laoshan in what is now the Shandong peninsula in northern China, 30 km east of the city of Qingdao. He spent the rest of his life translating and editing the scriptures he had collected.