Takshashila (Taxila) drew students from across the ancient subcontinent for advanced study from the mid-first millennium BCE, while Nalanda, founded in the Gupta period, grew into a vast residential monastic university with thousands of students, ranked teachers, lecture halls, dormitories and one of the great libraries of the medieval world. Endowed by rulers and managed by the monastic community, Nalanda taught logic, medicine, grammar, mathematics and Buddhist philosophy and attracted scholars from China, Korea and Tibet. Chinese pilgrims such as Xuanzang left detailed accounts of its scale and curriculum. These centres predate the European university by many centuries.
They were among the world's earliest organised centres of higher learning, creating planned campus precincts and international scholarly networks across Asia. Their model of an endowed, residential teaching community is a key non-European precursor to the university quarter.