David Leffman has written a cracking book on the murder of a British diplomat, Augustus Raymond Margary, in China near the border with Burma on 21 February 1875. He begins by outlining the problem of finding out whodunnit:
Margary may have been beheaded. Or not. Perhaps he shot one of his attackers before being killed, though this same man - or somebody that officials claimed was the same man - later denied it. Margary's Chinese servants all died alongside him, or were picked off elsewhere, or one of them escaped. The attack happened inside Mangyun at a banquet, outside the town on the way to some hot springs, or up in the far-off hills.
His killers were regular Chinese soldiers, lawless bandits, tribal "savages", former Muslim rebels or a civil militia; they might have been led by a warlord, were acting independently, were under orders from the Chinese provincial governor, or were obeying the wishes of the Burmese king. The men arrested for the crime all confessed their guilt, or they were innocent villagers whose admissions were fabricated by a court interpreter. It's possible the interpreter himself was the murderer.
So whose version of events to believe? …
I will leave the story for you to read in David’s book. The background which he describes, having sorted out everything from modern places names to all the people involved called Li, was that Margary was moving ahead of a what is perhaps best described as a political mission looking into the possibility of opening up a trade route from British India, through Burma, to southern China. It was led by Colonel Horace Albert Browne (1831-1914). It turned back when attacked after Margary was killed by a large band although who the assailants were working for can be discussed along just the same lines as trying to work out who murdered Margary. The attack was repulsed. The squad of fifteen British Indian Army Sikh soldiers specially selected to escort the mission earned their pay and praise.
The medical officer/naturalist for the mission was Dr John Anderson. Anderson had the same role in an earlier mission with the same purpose and through the same country in 1868 that was led by Colonel (later Sir) Edward Bosc Sladen (1831–1890) and it was Anderson who wrote a an account of both missions in his book, Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875 under Colonel Edward B. Sladen and Colonel Horace Browne.
I have come across Anderson before since he named a rat collected in the first expedition for Sladen. The identity of that rat and probably wrongly identified as a species occurring in Hong Kong I discussed HERE. But who was John Anderson?
John Anderson
John Anderson was born in Edinburgh in 1833. Both he and his elder brother, Thomas, were interested in natural history and both worked in India for a part of their lives. On leaving school John worked for the Bank of Scotland. He left in order to study medicine ,like his brother. Also like his brother he became more interested in the basic biology part of his education, in his case zoology and comparative anatomy, in his brother’s case botany. Over this period John dredged for crustaceans and other marine organisms in the Firth of Forth and described their morphology and proposed changes to their classification. He presented his work to the now extinct and poorly named Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh and published his findings in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. He also included it in his M.D. thesis on nothing medical but entitled Contributions to Zoology. For that he was awarded a gold medal at his graduation rom the University of Edinburgh in 1861.
One paper began with:
Three years ago, I drew the attention of this Society to the fact of the frequent occurrence of Sacculina and Peltogaster on some of the Crustacea of the Firth of Forth. For some years past the subject of the affinities of these parasites has been occupying the minds of many foreign observers; and the following observations, therefore, are brought before the Society in the hope that they may tend to throw some light upon this difficult question…
In 1863-1864 he was professor of natural science at the Free Church College, Edinburgh (now the Edinburgh Theological Seminary). He left there for India.
I am slightly confused because notes on him from the Royal Society of Edinburgh show he was employed by the Indian Medical Service for his entire 21 years in India from 1865. If so then we can only assume that the post to which he was recruited was allocated for administrative purposes to that service. The background to his appointment in Calcutta was that the government of India (the Raj) had taken on the collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal to form the nucleus of a museum. The government in India asked the Secretary of State for India in London to find somebody suitable for the job of curator. Anderson was appointed and a few years later upped in status to Superintendent. In addition he became Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Medical College, Calcutta. He held both offices until his retirement from India in 1886. The present building was completed in 1875. When we visited the museum in 2007 we made straight for the zoology collection. We suspected it had altered little since Anderson’s day. The legs of each cabinet of stuffed animals stood in a small trough of water as was always advised in the tropics to prevent destruction by insects. Later we crossed the Hooghly by the Howrah Bridge and visited the botanical gardens where Anderson’s brother Thomas had been Director in the 1860s before returning ill to Edinburgh where he died in 1870, aged 38.
It was while curator of the museum that John Anderson was medical officer and naturalist to the two missions to Yunnan.
Having written general accounts of both missions he turned his attention to the animals he had collected. He described them in papers and in a book that put them alongside other Asian animals: Anatomical and Zoological Researches: Comprising an Account of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to Western Yunnan in 1868 and 1975 and a Monograph of the Two Cetacean Genera, Platanista and Orcella. He didn’t go in for short titles. Nor short volumes since that was published with the text, over 900 pages, in one volume and the plates in another.
Anderson collected specimens whenever he could but apologised:
It is necessary that I should here give a short account of the two Expeditions, in order to bring out the difficulties with which I was beset as a naturalist, and which, to my great regret, were of so formidable a nature, that they restricted my investigations within the narrowest limits in a country the fauna of which is extremely rich and all but unknown.
The First Expedition was despatched in the end of 1867 from Calcutta, and returned in November 1868; and the Second Expedition left Mandalay on the 3rd January 1875, and returned thither on the 10th March of the same year.
By the permission of the Trustees of the Indian Museum, my services were placed at the disposal of the Government of India to accompany the two Missions as Naturalist and Medical Officer.
The ‘difficulties’ were indeed great as David Leffman covers in his book. Survival was not guaranteed on a mission opposed by two central governments and local vested interests.
I will return to the animals Anderson collected below other than to point out here an unforeseen problem with pickled reptiles during the first mission. The largely Muslim Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873) was in full swing in south-west Yunnan and followers occupied key towns and villages along the route. The Panthay governor ‘bearing the title Tu-tu-du’ and a Chinese chief who had joined the cause visited the travellers.
They demanded either a list of the presents intended for Momien or permission to search our baggage, both of which requests Sladen stoutly refused, and referred them to Momien for instructions. In the course of the day it came out that reports had been circulated that our boxes contained live dragons and serpents and fearful explosives. The fears of the Tu-tu-du were quieted by a peep at some bottled snakes and frogs, and he begged us to pay him an official visit. This, he said, would strengthen his influence over the townspeople, whom he described as thieves and ruffians.
In Calcutta Anderson must have had a far quieter life. His obituarist for the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Alfred William Alcock CIE, FRS (1859-1933) of the Indian Medical Service and a successor at the museum, noted:
He will also be remembered as one of the earliest advocates of a Zoological Garden for Calcutta, and as one of the experts who greatly assisted in giving shape to that Institution when it was started.
The zoo is now known as Alipore Zoo.
Alcock also noted that much progress was made in the discovery and description of Indian animals during Anderson’s time there:
The time at which Dr. Anderson arrived in India was fortunate in another respect. It coincided with a great impulse given to Indian zoology by the publication of Jerdon's "Birds of India," the last volume of which appeared in 1864, and with the presence in Calcutta of a larger number of men interested in the study of the fauna than were assembled there at any time before or since. Amongst these men were Jerdon himself, Ferdinand Stoliczka, Francis Day, and Valentine Ball, all of whom have now passed away.
Probably at no time has so much progress been made in the study of Indian Vertebrata as in the years 1861-74, and in this work Dr. Anderson took an important part.
Between the two missions to Yunnan, John Anderson, aged 37, married Grace Scott Thoms (1834-1917) in Dundee on 8 December 1870.
John Anderson was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1879. After that he undertook his only other collecting expedition while based in India—to Tenasserim and the Mergui Archipelago in 1881-82. A multi-author, two-volume, account of the fauna was published in 1889. He also published a historical account of commercial and political interactions between British India and ports in Burma and Siam under the title English Intercourse with Siam in the Seventeenth Century.
During home leave one can deduce from the address Anderson gave in the preface to books that he stayed in his home city of Edinburgh (he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1874). Number 6 Royal Terrace is now listed as part of a long terrace of town houses designed by William Playfair and built between 1823 and the early 1830s. However when he retired from India in 1886 aged 53 he settled in London after travelling in Japan with his wife.
In London Anderson was in poor health and he spent several winters in Egypt. He did not idle away his time, embarking on a study of mammals, reptiles and amphibians occurring there and in neighbouring countries. The first part was published in 1898; the second was completed after his death and published in 1902.
Anderson also began a collection of fish from the Nile and its tributaries after his death that work was continued with support from the Egyptian Government.
In London John Anderson lived at 71 Harrington Gardens, South Kensington. He continued zoological work and was well-known at meetings of the Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society and Linnean Society. He had been a fellow of the Zoological Society of London since 1869 and a vice-president for many years.
Ethnography was another of Anderson’s interests not just in terms of objects for the Calcutta museum. For example, in the Mergui Archipelago he studied what are now called the Moken and in Japan collected Ainu artefacts; that collection was given to the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
John Anderson died ‘after a few hours’ illness’ at Buxton, a spa town in Derbyshire on 15 August 1900; he was 66. He left an estate of £13,767, 5s. 7d.—worth about £2 million in 2026. His wife died in London on 2 October 1917. They are buried together in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh.
Alfred Alcock in his obituary summed up Anderson’s contributions:
Both in our Indian Empire and in North-Eastern Africa, Dr. Anderson contributed much to the solution of one the chief biological questions of the present day, an accurate knowledge of the distribution of animal life.
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| Anderson's Tombstone Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh Scotland, Burial Monument Inscriptions, 1507-2024 |
Dolphins, Rats and Captain Bowers
A substantial part of Anderson’s book on the zoology of the missions was taken up by a monograph on two cetacean genera. He compared the anatomy of the Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcella brevirostris) with that of the very different in appearance Ganges River Dolphin (Platanista gangetica). He obtained a specimen of the former at the town of Bhoma, the highest navigable point of the Irrawaddy (now called the Ayeyarwady in Myanmar) on the first mission. He saw lots of the dolphins cavorting in the water but could not get his hands on a specimen since the fishermen ‘regard them with a superstitious respect, and each village is believed to be under the protection of a particular dolphin, which guards the fishery’. Not even the offer of 100 rupees worked.
…it was only by the fortunate acquisition of a dead carcass thrown upon the bank, and secured by Captain Bowers, that I was enabled to make a thorough comparison of the structure of this remarkable inhabitant of the river.
Captain Bowers was one of three delegates from the commercial community of Rangoon, in other words, the certain beneficiaries of increased trade to and from China along the Irrawaddy.
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Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcella brevirostris)
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| Berylmys bowersi. Bowers’s White-toothed Rat (current name) From Volume 2: Plates Anatomical and Zoological Researches: Comprising an Account of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to Western Yunnan in 1868 and 1975… |
Captain Alexander Bowers (born 1826, Greenock, Scotland; died 1887 Mergui, Burma) was a master mariner who produced his own report after the Sladen Mission. A copy of Bhamo Expedition. Report on the Practicability of Re-opening the Trade Route, between Burma and Western China, Rangoon, American Mission Press, 1869, sold at auction for £2,400 in 2026. However, Alexander Bowers who died in 1887 has another but tragic place in history. His son, Henry Robertson ‘Birdie’ Bowers (born 1883) died with Captain Scott and Edward Wilson in the Antarctic. Both father and son have now appeared in these jottings independently (see HERE).
Anderson also named animals from the first mission for Sladen. I will cover Sladen and his eponymous rodents in another article.
Eponyms
In recognition of his work Anderson’s name was assigned to species described by others from the 1800s to 2018. In some cases his name has been used as part of the common name but not the scientific name. Particularly poignant is Anderson’s Gerbil, Gerbillus andersoni, named by William Edward de Winton (1856-1922) who completed the second volume on North African mammals after Anderson’s death.
Leffman D. 2025. A Murder in Yunnan: The Unsolved Killing of a British Diplomat on China's Southwestern Frontier. Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books. ISBN 978-988-76749-1-7. Available on Amazon HERE.
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| The now critically endangered Burmese Roofed Turtle (Batagur trivittata) Once common and collected by Anderson at Bhamo |
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