Mani was born about 216 CE near the Sasanian capital in Mesopotamia, into a Jewish-Christian baptising community from which he separated after visions he attributed to a heavenly twin. He preached in Iran and travelled to India, and for a time enjoyed the protection of the Sasanian king Shapur I. Under a later king the Zoroastrian priesthood turned against him, and he died in prison around 274 to 277.
The religion then spread with remarkable speed in both directions. Westward it reached Egypt, North Africa, Italy and Spain, and Roman authorities from Diocletian onward legislated against it as a Persian import; Christian emperors continued the suppression, and in the Latin West it was effectively gone by the sixth century. Eastward it travelled the Silk Road into Central Asia, where it found its one moment of state establishment: the Uyghur Khaganate adopted it as the official religion after the conversion of its ruler in 762, and it remained so until the khaganate fell in 840.
In China it arrived in the seventh century and was tolerated, then proscribed in the ninth-century suppression of foreign religions, after which it survived in the south by assimilation. Communities persisted in Fujian, where Mani was assimilated to a Buddha of Light, and the shrine at Cao'an, with a stone image dated to the fourteenth century, is the only Manichaean building still standing. Whether an unbroken community survived there into modern times is debated; what is not in doubt is that Manichaean texts, images and vocabulary persisted in the region long after the religion was supposed to have disappeared, and Chinese scholars continue to identify material there.
For centuries the religion was known almost entirely through its enemies: Augustine in Latin, Ephrem in Syriac, Muslim and Zoroastrian polemicists in the east. That changed with three discoveries. Manuscript fragments in Iranian and Turkic languages were excavated at Turfan in Chinese Central Asia from 1902. Coptic Manichaean codices, including the Kephalaia, the Psalm-Book and Mani's own letters, were bought at Medinet Madi in Egypt in 1929, though part of that collection was lost in Berlin during the Second World War. Greek fragments of a Cologne Mani Codex, a miniature parchment book describing Mani's early life, were identified in the 1960s. Between them these recovered the religion in its own words, and the modern account of Manichaeism is substantially a twentieth-century reconstruction.
No adherents remain.