In 1816, a 32-year-old Hungarian scholar with a special gift for learning languages won a scholarship to study at the University of Götting...
In 1816, a 32-year-old Hungarian scholar with a special gift for learning languages won a scholarship to study at the University of Göttingen, a prestigious research institution in Germany. This event set Sándor Kőrösi Csoma or Alexander Csoma de Kőrös on a journey that would eventually take him to the outer boundaries of Tibet and help Europe get an understanding of the philosophy and culture of the “roof of the world”.
In three years at the university, Csoma studied Asian languages and developed an interest in Central Asia. Such was his passion for the East that the Hungarian made it his mission to unearth the linguistic links between Europe and Asia. To achieve this, he plotted a path from Europe to Mongolia via Odessa, Moscow and Irkutsk in Siberia, but the plan did not work out. Instead, he set off in 1819 on a long voyage from Romania to Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan until he finally reached India.
“We know now that Csoma’s original plan ‘for the development of some obscure points of Asiatic and European history,’ conceived in Hungary, was to proceed through Central Asia, as (his professor Samuel) Hegedus pointedly remarks ‘towards the borders of the...