An adventurer, a writer and a director, 40-something female Sun Shuyun has many different roles to play in this society. More specifically, she has recently brought the fascinating history of Xuan Zang, Buddhism and the Silk Road to public attention.  With her accompanying book "Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud" and a documentary on Chinese women "Half the Sky", Sun's dramatic experiences and bravery deserve a long look.

Sun Shuyun, a child of the 1960s, grew up in a small village in central China.  Like most teenagers of her time, she read, and was fascinated by, the story of the Monkey King.

"When we grew up, we all grew up knowing a great deal about that famous Chinese novel, The Monkey King.  In this novel, the monkey is the hero and the monk is the anti-hero.  The monk is very weak and indecisive, he can't even tell right from wrong, human from demon, making him really quite hopeless."

After all, the Monkey King is fictitious, and far less threatening to authority than reality. For example,  Sun Shuyun was taught at school to recognize Buddhism as a product of superstition and feudalistic, anti-progressive thinking.  Indeed, her whole generation learnt very little about Buddhism, while Sun herself experienced misunderstandings with her grandmother, a devout Buddhist.  Therefore, it was not until Sun went to study at Oxford that she discovered the real identity of monk Xuan Zang, who was previously only known to her because of his role in the Monkey King.

"When we were at university, we learnt about this true-life character Xuan Zang, who went to India, spent many years there and came back with many books which he had been searching for. He later translated them into Chinese, and we're still using some of those books today.  But that's about all we learned, and such information did not provide me with a real flesh and blood person."

Instead, Sun Suyun's opinion towards monk Xuan Zang was changed by a question from one of her Oxford classmates.  This Indian student asked Sun: Who do you think us Indians consider to be the greatest Chinese?  To Sun's great surprise, the answer was none other than monk Xuan Zang. Later, she made a big decision, to take the same path to India as Xuan Zang.  Therefore, in 1999, she made her journey to the west, and created the book "Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud", a memorandum of an experience both demanding and meaningful.

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