Cunningham and the Archaeological Survey

Alexander Cunningham, a Bengal Engineers officer who had dug at Sarnath and Sanchi, gave Canning a memorandum at Allahabad in November 1861. It opens: "During the one hundred years of British dominion in India the Government has done little or nothing towards the preservation of its ancient monuments". Canning's Minute of 22 January 1862 approved a survey of northern India, and Cunningham began work that season, using Xuanzang's itinerary to find the places the pilgrim named.

His four reports covered the land from Gaya to the Indus. John Lawrence's government wound the survey up in 1866, and it came back in 1871 as a department with Cunningham as Director General. Many pins in the early chapters of this atlas rest on this work, and on the identifications it made from Chinese and Greek texts.

The founding date is given as 1861, from the memorandum; the Minute approving the survey is dated January 1862. The Survey is also part of the story of what left India: it recorded sites in the same decades that sculptures were being shipped to Britain.