- Lived:
- r. c. 375–415 CE · Pāṭaliputra (Patna), with Ujjayinī (Ujjain) as the empire's western seat — an empire reaching, by his death, from Bengal to the Arabian Sea
- Field:
- emperor — the Gupta dynasty at its height; conqueror of the last Śaka kingdom; the "Vikramāditya" of a thousand later legends
- The Big Idea:
- He finished the empire his father built, annexed India's western coast and its ports — and then a Chinese pilgrim walked across the whole machine and wrote down what it was like, giving India its first outside report card: glowing on prosperity and freedom, damning on untouchability.
- In their words:
- "…having the name of Chandra, (he) carried a beauty of countenance like (the beauty of) the full moon." (his court's epitaph for him, on the Delhi iron pillar, in J. F. Fleet's translation — the emperor's own voice, as usual, does not survive)
- If you remember one thing:
- The most-praised reign in ancient Indian history is the one where we finally stop having to take the king's word for it — a foreign monk vouched for the peace, a rustless iron pillar still vouches for the engineers, and a banned-feeling fragment of a play vouches that the family's dirty secret was real enough to need deleting.