A Chinese monk once walked from China to India. It took him eight years, crossing deserts and mountain ranges, just to attend a university. When he finally arrived, the gatekeepers rejected 7 out of every 10 people who showed up.
His name was Xuanzang, and the university was Nalanda. He left China in 629 CE and reached the gate in 637. If he hadn't written the journey down in a book, we'd dismiss the story as a legend today.
Nalanda had been operating for over 200 years by the time Xuanzang walked through the gate. An Indian king named Kumaragupta I founded it around 427 CE, back when most of Europe was still picking up the pieces after Rome fell. Oxford would not start teaching for another 669 years. Bologna, Europe's oldest university, would not open until 1088.
At its peak, the campus held 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers. That works out to five students per teacher, a ratio most modern universities can't hit even today. Students came from China, Korea, Tibet, Japan, Persia, Turkey, and Indonesia. Tuition cost nothing. The king had assigned entire villages to Nalanda, and the produce and rent from those villages paid for everything.
Students studied medicine (what we now call Ayurveda), math, astronomy, logic, grammar, metalworking, politics, and the art of war. This was a Buddhist monastery with a course on military strategy. Aryabhata, the mathematician who first proposed that the earth spins on its own axis around the year 499, may have led Nalanda in the 6th century.
The library was its own complex of three separate buildings. One of them stood nine stories tall. Tibetan records estimate it held around 9 million manuscripts, every single one copied by hand. They had no printing press, no mass-produced paper, nothing but ink, dried palm leaves, and monks who copied texts for decades on end.
The end came in 1193 CE. An invading army led by Bakhtiyar Khilji rode in, killed thousands of monks, and set the library on fire. The fires burned for three months. A Persian historian wrote that smoke hung over the hills like a dark cloud for days. Centuries of work in medicine, math, and astronomy went with it. Most of it was unique to Nalanda and gone forever.
The ruins sat forgotten for 619 years. In 1812, a Scottish surveyor named Francis Buchanan-Hamilton came upon them while mapping the region. He had no idea what he'd stumbled onto. Another 50 years passed before anyone identified the site as Nalanda. UNESCO made it a World Heritage site in 2016. The new Nalanda University opened on nearby land in 2014, and its 485-acre net-zero campus was formally inaugurated in June 2024.
The original Nalanda operated for 766 years before Khilji shut it down. Harvard, for scale, is 390 years old. If Nalanda had survived, it would be turning 1,600 next year.
