Walking the Archive: Serindia (1921) and the Afterlives of Xuanzang's Spatial Imagination

ABSTRACT This paper reads Serindia (1921) as an archaeological afterlife of Xuanzang's Da Tang Xiyu Ji , arguing that Aurel Stein's explorations participate in a distinctly modernist geography shaped by movement, fragmentation, and layered temporality. Guided by earlier textual itineraries, Stein reconstructs Central Asia not as an empty terrain but as a landscape structured by memory, ruins, and historical circulation. His method transforms travel into a form of reading, in which space is approached through philology, translation, and material traces. Through close attention to Stein's descriptions of desert routes, rediscovered sites, and manuscript and artefact finds, the paper demonstrates how Serindia constructs space through a spatial synthesis of ruins, texts, and routes, bringing disparate temporal and material strata into alignment. Rather than producing fragmentation for its own sake, this process reorients multiplicity toward historical reconstruction, integrating archaeological evidence with textual memory. Xuanzang's narrative geography persists as a latent structure within Stein's empirical mapping, shaping the rediscovery of Buddhist networks across the Silk Road. Space in Serindia thus emerges not as fixed territory but as a palimpsest of textual and material histories, in which past journeys continue to organize modern perception and movement across regions. Stein's work reveals how modernist geography can take form through the reactivation of earlier spatial imaginaries, suggesting an alternative genealogy of modern spatial consciousness. In this sense, Serindia constitutes an afterlife of Xiyu Ji , translating a seventh‐century sacred landscape into a modern archaeological and historical consciousness.