Tracking down Nepali artefacts peppered around museums in Europe and beyond can be a treasure hunt of sorts.

Most of what we had known about Jung Bahadur Rana’s Europe trip was from a lost diary narrated by his son Padma Jung, published posthumously, in 1909.

The 1802 British expedition to Nepal by surgeon-naturalist Francis Buchanan-Hamilton was seminal for two reasons—it introduced 1,100 species of plants to the world of botany and it gave the world the very first scientific map of Nepal.

In the winter of 2006, my first visit to Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London was for a rare exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s original sketches.