Kamala Thiagarajan: The mysterious disappearance of the world's longest shrubbery
The natural living barrier was described as "utterly impassable to man or beast", and snaked across India from the Indus River to the Mahanadi. But why doesn't anyone remember it? In a second-hand bookstore in London, in late 1994, author Roy Moxham made a discovery that would consume the next three years of his life. Wedged in the footnotes of a colonial-era book published in 1893 that he had just purchased, was a fascinating, long-forgotten piece of Indian history.
The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make
The forgotten medieval fruit with a vulgar name
The mystery of the lost Roman herb
In the book Rambles
and Recollections of an Indian official by Major General WH Sleeman,
in a chapter called Transit
Duties in India – Mode of Collecting Them, was a startling reference to a
"customs hedge" – a natural barrier that the book described as
becoming "gradually a monstrous system to which it would be almost
impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilised country".
The details about the
hedge itself were sparse, but whatever was documented was enough to deeply
puzzle Moxham, who had by then made five journeys to India without ever hearing
about the hedge. The hedge was allegedly built over a customs line, which the book
mentioned was established in 1869 and expanded to stretch across the length of
India, covering an estimated 2,300 miles (3,701km) – the distance from London
to Istanbul (then Constantinople). It was guarded by 12,000 British officers,
at an annual cost of 1,620,000 rupees (£162,000 or $220,716, based on the
exchange rate today)….
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210824-how-the-worlds-longest-shrubbery-vanished-without-trace
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