Lieutenant Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident in Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805. He also built the historic Koti Residency in Hyderabad, a landmark and major tourist attraction. He married a local Hyderabadi noblewoman...

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a founder (with Dwarkanath Tagore and other Bengali Brahmins) of the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 which engendered the Brahmo Samaj, an influential Indian socio-religious reform movement. His influence was apparent in the fie...

Bahadur Shah II, also known as Zafar (his name as an Urdu poet), last Mughal emperor of India (1837–57). A political figurehead, he was completely controlled by the British East India Company, who found it convenient to maintain the fiction...

Aleksander Pavlovich Romanov or Tsar Alexander I (The Blessed), was Emperor of Russia from 1801-1825 and King of Poland from 1815–1825. The son of the Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, afterwards Paul I, and Maria Fedorovna, daughter of the Duke o...

Colonel James Skinner was an Anglo-Indian mercenary in India, who became known as Sikandar Sahib later in life, and is most known for two cavalry regiments he raised for the British, later known as 1st Skinner's Horse and 3rd Skinner's Hors...

Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the legendary "Lion of the Punjab", was the founder of the Sikh Empire, which came to power in the Indian subcontinent in the early half of the 19th century. The empire, based in the Punjab region, existed from 1799 t...

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was a British statesman, Lieutenant-Governor of British Java (1811 – 1815), Governor-General of Bencoolen (1817 – 1822), best known for his founding of the city of Singapore in 1819 (now the city-state of the Rep...

The Daoguang Emperor was the eighth emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty and the sixth Qing emperor to rule over China, from 1820 to 1850. His reign was marked by "external disaster and internal rebellion," that is, by the First Opium War, an...

William Fraser was a British India civil servant who was an Agent to the Governor General of India and Commissioner of the Delhi Territory during the reign of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. His bungalow, a low domed structu...

Shuja Shah Durrani (also known as Shah Shujah, Shoja Shah, Shujah al-Mulk) was ruler of the Durrani Empire from 1803 to 1809. He then ruled from 1839 until his death in 1842. Shuja Shah was of the Sadozai line of the Abdali group of Pashtun...

Lin Zexu, courtesy name Yuanfu, was a Chinese scholar and official of the Qing dynasty. He is most recognized for his conduct and his constant position on the "moral high ground" in his fight, as a "shepherd" of his people, against the o...

Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pottinger was an Anglo-Irish soldier and colonial administrator who became the first Governor of Hong Kong (1843-1844). Pottinger accepted Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston's offer of the post of envoy and pl...

Colonel Sir George Everest was a Welsh surveyor, geographer and Surveyor-General of India from 1830 to 1843. Sir George was largely responsible for completing the section of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India along the meridian arc fro...

Matthew Calbraith Perry was a Commodore of the U.S. Navy and commanded a number of ships. He served in several wars, most notably in the Mexican-American War and the War of 1812. He played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West...

Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, 4th Baronet, was an East India Company civil servant and agent of the Governor General of India at the imperial court of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. In 1830, Metcalfe began to build the "Metcalf...