In 1802, the botanist Francis Buchanan-Hamilton accompanied a British East India Company embassy to Kathmandu in Nepal. While travelling in the country Buchanan-Hamilton gathered much information on the topography of Nepal and began to form a herbarium of Nepali plants. On the conclusion of the embassy, he was made personal physician to Richard Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley and appointed director of the Natural History Project of India, a huge effort to classify all South Asian fauna. However, in 1805, Wellesley had a disagreement with the East India Company and left India, taking Buchanan-Hamilton with him.
Buchanan-Hamilton returned to Asia in 1807 to undertake an extensive survey of Bengal, similar to that he had undertaken in Mysore in 1800. In 1814, he was rewarded with the post of superintendent of the botanical gardens at Calcutta (now Kolkata). He retired from India in 1815, and presented his natural history collection to the East India Company. The Company, however, did not acknowledge the gift, and Buchanan-Hamilton, rather than continue to edit his Bengal survey, set about editing his natural history notes and accounts of his travels for publication to a wider audience. His account of Nepal was printed at Edinburgh in 1819. The book contains a plate showing Kathmandu and four panoramas of the Himalayas as seen from the Kathmandu valley.