Xuanzang died in 664 and was buried near Chang'an; his remains were later moved, and at some point a portion of his skull came to rest at a temple in Nanjing. There the trail goes quiet for centuries, until the Second World War. In late 1942 Japanese troops occupying Nanjing, digging near the ruins of the Grand Bao'en Temple to build a shrine, turned up a stone casket whose inscription identified the bone inside as a parietal-bone relic of Xuanzang.
What followed says as much about modern politics as about medieval piety. Under public pressure the occupation authorities and the collaborationist Wang Jingwei government negotiated, and the relic was divided into portions sent to Japan, to Beijing and back to Nanjing. Over the decades since, it has been subdivided more than a dozen times as a diplomatic and devotional gift, so that fragments identified with the original are now enshrined at multiple sites across mainland China, in Japan, in Taiwan, the portion once in Japan was given to the Xuanzang Temple at Sun Moon Lake, and in India, at the site of Nalanda where he once studied. This atlas records that dispersed relic as the Skull Relic of Xuanzang, an artifact whose modern history is nearly as remarkable as the monk's own journey: a seventh-century pilgrim who, in fragments, went on travelling.