Hamilton Bower

Sir Hamilton Bower
Sir Hamilton Bower
Born	1 September 1858
Died	5 March 1940
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	British Indian Army
Rank	Major General
Commands held	Dehra Ismail Khan Brigade Assam Brigade
Awards	Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath

Major-General Sir Hamilton Bower KCB (1858–1940) was a British Indian Army officer who wrote about his travels through Chinese Turkestan and Tibet.

He was born 1 September 1858, the son of Admiral J. Paterson Bower. He was educated at Edinburgh Collegiate School and the Royal Naval School, New Cross. He later married Maud Edith Ainslie and had three daughters.

Originally commissioned into the Duke of Edinburgh's Own Artillery Militia, he was appointed a Second Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment 23 October 1880. He was appointed to the Indian Staff Corps 2 February 1884 and posted to the 17th Cavalry 15 September 1885.

In 1889-1890 Lieutenant Hamilton Bower travelled through Chinese Turkestan, where in the city of Kucha he purchased a Sanskrit-language manuscript written in the Brahmi alphabet. The medical manuscript, which later became known as the Bower Manuscript, sent a shock-wave through the world of Indian scholarship, especially Indology, pointing to the existence of a forgotten Buddhist civilization in Chinese Turkestan.

During his time in Turkestan, Bower, who was then a British intelligence officer on a Government mission, attempted to track down the killer of Andrew Dalgleish, a Scottish trader murdered on the road from Leh to Yarkand in 1888.

In the 1890s Bower travelled to Tibet and wrote a memoir of his experiences entitled Diary of a Journey across Tibet. In 1894 he received the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's's Gold Medal "for his remarkable journey across Tibet, from west to east".

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