In his vast list of herbarium specimens gathered under the auspices of the East India Company (Wallich, Reference Wallich1829–Reference Wallich1849), Nathaniel Wallich included as number 4299, Euonymus bullatus, represented as a collection made by Francis De Silva in the region of Sylhet in 1824. The original field ticket written by De Silva, still on the sheet in the East India Company Herbarium (K-W) at Kew, gives the locality as Pondawah Hill. This is likely to be a variant spelling of Pundua, a locality often given for the Sylhet region in the Wallich collections (C. B. Clarke in Anonymous, 1913). It equates to Pandua in modern Bangladesh, just south of the border with India. As Clarke noted, De Silva's specimens from Pundua are most likely to have been made in the Khasia Hills to the north of Pundua, in what is now the Indian state of Meghalaya.

Wallich's species name as published in the Numerical List is not valid, because there is no accompanying description or reference to one. The species must have soon been brought into cultivation by Wallich at Calcutta and material sent to Europe, where it was taken up as a glasshouse plant. In 1831, the nursery firm of Conrad Loddiges & Sons, of Hackney, included Euonymus bullatus in their periodical, the Botanical Cabinet (scientific author, George Loddiges; Turner, Reference Turner2016). A plate and brief account of the plant appeared as follows:

Recent revisions of Euonymus (Ramamurthy, Reference Ramamurthy, Singh, Vohra, Hajra and Singh2000; Ma, Reference Ma2001) have cited Euonymus bullatus as validated in the Botanical Cabinet. However, the descriptive content of the text by Loddiges is very slight. I therefore requested a binding decision (Turner, Reference Turner2015: 1334) under ICN Art. 38.4 (McNeill et al., Reference McNeill, Barrie, Buck, Demoulin, Greuter, Hawksworth, Herendeen, Knapp, Marhold, Prado, Prud'homme van Reine, Smith, Wiersema and Turland2012) on whether the descriptive statement was adequate to validate the name. The Nomenclature Committee for Vascular Plants made the decision that the descriptive statement was not adequate to validate the name (Applequist, Reference Applequist2017: 512). The General Committee came to the same judgement (Wilson, Reference Wilson2017: 743). Therefore, Euonymus bullatus Wall. ex G.Lodd. must be considered a nomen nudum. Apparently, Wallich's name was not validated until more than forty years later, when Lawson provided a description in the Flora of British India. The only gathering cited directly by Lawson was the original De Silva collection, and the sheet in K-W is here designated as the lectotype.