Ashoka

Thrilling new biography about the first man to rule all of the Indian subcontinent - Asia's lost emperor, Ashoka.

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 and set up a new yardstick for government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave experiment ended in tragedy and his name was cleansed from the record so effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years.

But a few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions survived and the story of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British Orientalists and their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan story were found and 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 is about India's distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.