User:Kdammers/Badmayev

Normal 0          false  false  false    EN-US  X-NONE  X-NONE                                       MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Peter Badmayev (Russian: Pyotr Aleksandrovich Badmayev) (born ca. 1850 as Zhamsaran) was a Russian doctor active in the Asian politics of his country around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. He was Alexander III's and Nikolai II's personal physician and consultant. He served as an adviser on the Russian Foreign Ministry's Asian desk in 1873 and became a well-known figure in Russia's hand in the Great Game. He established a trading house in Chita as a cover for spies. He proposed arming the Mongols as a prelude for a Russian conquest of Mongolia, Tibet and China.

His plan was not well received by Czar Alexander, but Badmayev persisted, visiting Mongolia and Tibet and peddling his ideas to various people of power in Russia, e.g., Prince Uhtomskii.

Badmayev put out the first newspaper printed in Mongolian, a Russian-Mongolian affair called Light in the Far East in translation.

Early life
Badmayev's older brother Sultim had a pharmacy in St. Petersburg and invited the younger man to the city after his graduation from the Russian Gymnasium in Irkutsk. In St. Petersburg, he studied at the Military Academy and the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg, without graduating from either one. Instead, he began cutting a figure in the city's upper social classes. He married a wealthy woman, Nadezhda Vassilyevna around 1872 and set up a very successful clinic Mysticism and Tibetan weltanschauung were all the range in the upper reaches of Russian society at that time, and Badmayev translated the Tibetan Gyushi.