
India's lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone Ashoka turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion & set up a new yardstick for government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave experiment ended in tragedy & his name was cleansed from the record so effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years. But a few mysterious stone monuments & inscriptions survived, & the story of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British Orientalists & their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan story were found & in the process India's ancient history was itself recovered. In a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is as much about Britain's entanglement with India as it as about India's distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.