"Francis Buchanan was born in Scotland in 1762 and qualified as a medical doctor in 1783. He made several journeys to Asia and went on to become one of British India’s foremost surveyors. His travel accounts/surveys have been published and republished in India. In this volume Prof. Willem van Schendel presents a 200 years old, virtually unknown document ‘An Account of a Journey Undertaken by Order of the Board of Trade Through the Provinces of Chittagong and Tiperah in Order to Look Out for the Places Most Proper for the Cultivation of Spices’ by Francis Buchanan, M.D. Buchanan undertook this journey in 1798 and only one copy of his report survives in the British Library which has remained unpublished so far. It is the earliest detailed travel account on the region that we have and is a significant source of new information on eighteenth century Bengal, Arakan, Tripura, Cachar, Manipur, Mizoram and Burma.