William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Wu Zetian’s zealous patronage saw Buddhism become the dominant religion of China. As Dalrymple writes, ‘never again would the civilisation of India and China be bound together so intimately’. Today, about half of the world’s 500 million Buddhists live in China. There is a stream of cultural exchange involving Buddhists visiting important centres of learning in India and China. The world’s remaining Buddhists belong to a long history of the migration of monks, teachers, ideas, traders, and pilgrims between the home of Buddhism in northern India and other parts of Asia and Central Asia. Borobudur in Indonesia, for instance, remains the largest Buddhist temple ever built. This and many other cultural icons prompt Dalrymple to suggest that Buddhism has been one of the greatest transformational influences in world history. Given the pivotal role of India in that process, the book represents a critical counterpoint to the existing scholarly work that focuses much more on the Chinese-Central, Asian-Persian spheres of influence.