8 results
Nepal and the Himalayan Countries
Isabelle Massieu (1844–1932) was a French writer and traveler who became the first French woman to visit Nepal. Beginning in 1892, she undertook a series of journeys from her native Paris that took her to nearly all parts of Asia and resulted in the publication of several popular books. Népal et pays himalayens (Nepal and the Himalayan countries) is a first-hand account of her 1908 voyage from the Sutlej Valley in northern India across Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim to Tibet. Massieu describes the people, landscape, and architecture of the ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
Nepal: An Historical Study of a Hindu Kingdom
Le Nepal: étude historique d’un royaume hindou (Nepal: An historical study of a Hindu kingdom) is a three-volume work by the eminent French orientalist Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935). Lévi became a lecturer at the school of higher studies in Paris in 1886 and taught Sanskrit at the Sorbonne in 1889–94. He was appointed professor at the Collège de France in 1894. Volume 1 of Lévi’s study provides an introduction to Nepal; an overview of the European, Chinese and Tibetan, and indigenous source documents relating to the country ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
A Catalogue of Palm-leaf and Selected Paper Manuscripts Belonging to the Durbar Library, Nepal
Mahāmahopādhyāya Hara Prasād Sastri, an Indian scholar affiliated with the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and Cecil Bendall, professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge University in England, made a research expedition to Nepal in 1898–99. A major objective of the expedition was to examine and catalog the palm-leaf manuscripts in the Durbar Library, many of which had been acquired by Mahārāja Sir Vīra Sumsher Jung Bahādur Rānā. According to Bendall, this collection, “as regards the antiquity of the documents,” was “surpassed by no Sanskrit Library known to exist.” This book, printed ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni’s Birth-Place in the Nepalese Tarai
In the 1870s, the Archaeological Survey of India undertook a series of expeditions to increase understanding of the early history of India and to further the preservation of important monuments and ruins. In 1896 German archaeologist Alois Anton Führer (1853–1930) received permission from the government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh and the government of India to carry out an expedition to Nepal. Führer generally is credited with discovering the birthplace of Buddha. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born in about 563 B.C. at the gardens of Lumbini ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal
Francis Hamilton Buchanan (1762-1829) was a Scottish-born explorer, naturalist, and physician, employed by the British East India Company in a number of capacities from 1794 to 1815. He conducted surveys of Mysore in 1800 and Bengal in 1807-14. This work, published after his return to Scotland, is based on his 14-month stay in Nepal in 1802-03. Buchanan drew upon his own observations and conversations with hereditary chiefs, Buddhist priests, scribes, and others in an attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the country as he found it before the Anglo-Nepalese ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
Journal of a Tour through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himālā Mountains, and to the Sources of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges
James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856) was a Scot who in 1813 went to Kolkata (Calcutta) to join the family firm of Becher and Fraser. He remained there until 1820. In 1815, he accompanied his brother William, who was taking part in the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-16, on an expedition into the Garwhal Hills to find the sources of the Jumna and Ganges rivers. James and William Fraser were the first Europeans to reach many of the places they visited, which James vividly described in this account of the journey. He characterized ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
India
This early-20th century map shows the British Empire in India, a complex political structure that was made up of provinces directly ruled by Britain and the Native--or Princely--States, which were ruled indirectly through Indian sovereigns subject to British suzerainty. Also shown on the map are the French and Portuguese enclaves, the independent states of Nepal and Bhutan, and the island of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), which was under British rule but not part of the Indian Empire. India became independent in 1947, but was partitioned into the states of India ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
Nepal - "First Halting Place on the River Raptee”
This watercolor is from a collection of 18 paintings of Indian subjects by William Tayler (1808–92) dating from around 1842–45. Tayler was a civil servant of the East India Company who lived in India from 1829 until 1867. He became commissioner of Patna in 1855 and in 1857 was involved in the suppression of the Sepoy Rebellion. His measures against the local people were regarded as excessively harsh by his superiors, and he was suspended and given an appointment of lower rank. An enthusiastic amateur artist, Tayler sketched ...
Contributed by
Brown University Library