Paul Pelliot

Paul Eugène Pelliot (English: pel-ee-OH, French: [pɔl øʒɛn pɛljo]; 28 May 1878 – 26 October 1945) was a French sinologist and Orientalist best known for his explorations of Central Asia and the Silk Road regions, and for his acquisition of many important Tibetan Empire-era manuscripts and Chinese texts at the Sachu printing center storage caves (Dunhuang), known as the Dunhuang manuscripts. A hyperpolyglot, he spoke 13 Oriental languages, including among others Mandarin and Cantonese, Turkish, Russian, Mongolian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Pashto, and Tagalog, as well as Sanskrit, and even rarer languages such as Uyghur, and the extinct languages Sogdian and Tocharian. He was a student of the Indologist Sylvain Lévi and the archaeologist Édouard Chavannes. Pelliot was a member of the French School of the Far East from 1899 to 1911, where he developed the school's sinology branch. In 1911, at the age of just 33, a chair in Languages, History, and Archaeology of Central Asia was created for him at the prestigious Collège de France.