杨衒之

Yang Xuanzhi was a figure of the Northern Wei period. Publicly available information about his life, including his dates of birth and death, is limited, and his exact nationality and an English name are not clearly recorded. He is known to later generations through A Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Luoyang, a work that uses the city's Buddhist temples as its thread to describe urban layout, architecture, people, and customs, while also touching on political change and social life. Combining historical and geographical scholarship with literary style, it is an important source for the study of Northern Dynasties history and Buddhist culture. Four related works are held in the collection: the annotated edition in The Collected Works of Zhou Zumo, the standard edition of the Record, an unannotated edition, and the four-volume Scenes of the Capital. They are often classified under historical reading and Eastern philosophy, serving both specialists and general readers interested in medieval urban civilization.