For reasons that have remained a mystery to me, Professor Forte did not visit North America until the fall of 2002, when he turned sixty-two, years after he established a worldwide reputation as a Sinologist. This occasioned my joking comparison of his visit to Vancouver with the epochal exploration into the American Continent attempted by his Italian compatriot Cristoforo Colombo (1450-1506). In retort, Professor Forte remarked, quite seriously, that while Colombo came for gold, he came for paper: an excuse to write on a cosmopolitan monastery in seventh to eighth century China closely related to the sole woman thearch—both in name and in reality—in the history of imperial China.