Monks spread both Buddhism and Indian medical knowledge as they walked along the Silk Route. Photo: Wellcome Collection
On the treacherous Karakoram Pass between India and China, a towering Pathan hacked a Scottish trader to death in 1888. The murderer ate a meal and slept in his victim’s tent. The next day, he disappeared.
More than a year later, British officer Hamilton Bower set out to track him. He travelled for months from Kashmir and into China. He arrived in Kuchar, an ancient Buddhist centre on the Silk Road at the edge of the Taklamakan desert. Snowy peaks of the Tian Shan range framed the city. There was no sign of the killer.
But Bower learned the land had yielded something else entirely unexpected. He befriended a local man who told him about the ruins of a Buddhist kingdom in the desert. After much persuasion, the man led Bower to the site. They left at midnight and rode for hours. As the sun rose, it illuminated a 50-foot-tall stupa of sun-dried bricks and crumbling wooden beams. It was there in the ruins that the man had earlier found a pocketbook.
When they returned to Kuchar, Bower examined the makeshift book. Wooden boards and string held together sheets of birch bark covered in Sanskrit lettering. Bower found it so intriguing he had bought it from the man. It was only months later when he returned to India that the book’s ancient past was revealed.
Also read: Bad Medicine, Fake History, Postcolonial Complicity: Ayurveda in the Time of COVID
What was this book, and why is it so important? Listen to episode 6 of the Scrolls & Leaves podcast to find out how this book unearthed from deep in the desert was an important link in the history of India’s medical traditions.
The episode traces how healing plants have transformed our history. They are not only our earliest forms of medicine, but their pursuit has created channels of trade and plunder, exploration and empires. And as the bedrock of the modern pharmaceutical industry, the transformation of plants has sometimes overthrown millennia of indigenous medical wisdom.
Listen using the audio player, and subscribe here. This episode is presented in immersive sound and you can place yourself in the scene if you listen with headphones.