KUQA (pronounced ku-cheh, and known to the Chinese as Kuche ) about one day by bus and 400km to the west of Ürümqi, China, is a good place to break the long journey from Ürümqi to Kashgar. It's a small town with a long history, and a largely Uigur population. The fourth-century linguist and scholar Kumarajiva , who came from here, was one of the most famous of all Chinese Buddhists. Having travelled to Kashmir for his education, he later returned to China as a teacher and translator of Buddhist documents from Sanskrit into Chinese. It was in large measure thanks to him that Buddhism came to be so widely understood in China and, by the early Tang, Kuqa was a major centre of Buddhism in China. The fantastic wealth of the trade caravans subsidized giant monasteries here, and Xuan Zang, passing through the city in the sixth century, reported the existence of two huge Buddha statues, twenty-seven metres high, guarding its entrances. The city even had its own, Indo-European language. With the arrival of Islam in the ninth century, however, this era finally began to draw to a close, and today only a few traces of Kuqa's glorious past remain.