Paul Pelliot

Paul Eugène Pelliot (28 May 187826 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 othersMandarin and Cantonese , Turkish, Russian, Mongolian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Pashto, and Tagalog, as well as Sanskrit, and even rarer languages such as Uyghur, and extinct languages Sogdian, and Tocharian.

He was a student of the Indologist Sylvain Lévi and the archaeologist Édouard Chavannes. Paul 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''. Provided by Wikipedia