Emil Schlagintweit and the Development of Nineteenth-Century Tibetology

Schlagintweit's scholarly activities need to be seen against the backdrop of the development of nineteenth-century Tibetological scholarship and within the context of Schlagintweit's personal biography. Situated to the North of the Indian subcontinent, and surrounded by high mountain ranges and desert landscapes, Tibet was close enough to the British empire to be of relevance to British imperial politics and of interest to scholars, diplomats, and adventurers in the subcontinent and beyond. At the same time, however, it was not itself a part of the British empire, and even by the second half of the nineteenth century relatively little was known in the West about its culture and society. Since the late eighteenth century, the Tibetan government had refused to admit foreign visitors from the West, and European travelers only succeeded very rarely (and mostly illicitly) in entering the country.Footnote ¹⁷ Knowledge of Tibet, its culture, religion, geography, and politics was therefore limited, and Tibetology as a discipline only took off very slowly.

The fact that Tibetology was a comparatively small discipline meant that scholars had to be particularly flexible in order to survive, and therefore, what emerged, was a mixture of different approaches to the study of Tibet and a transnational community of scholars interested in Tibet who supported (and argued with) each other. When Schlagintweit published his major works, Tibetology as an academic discipline was still in its infancy, the first chair in the subject having been established in Paris in 1842. Some of the earliest knowledge about Tibet had come from Catholic missionaries who had traveled to the country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Antonio Agostino Giorgi's's Alphabetum Tibetanum, for instance, had provided some (rather tendentious) insights into Tibetan Buddhism.Footnote ¹⁸ Later, during the Enlightenment, a number of philosophers discussed what role Tibetan Buddhism held in the development of humanity. For Hegel, for instance, Tibetan Buddhism represented a step in the unfolding of the “world spirit,” while Kant was interested in Tibet's role in the history of civilizational development.Footnote ¹⁹ By the early nineteenth century scholarly interest in Tibetan culture was picking up, and in 1834 the Hungarian Alexander Csoma de Körös compiled the first Tibetan-English dictionary, which continued to be a standard work of reference for several decades.Footnote ²⁰

Given that travel to Tibet was rarely an option, Tibetologists relied on material acquired outside of Tibet or held in European libraries. Most of this material had come to Europe via one of several routes: some manuscripts and objects had traveled from Tibet to British India and then onwards to libraries and private collections in Europe. Others had traveled overland through the Russian Empire, whereas others had been sent to Europe after having been procured through Tibetan lamas teaching in Beijing.Footnote ²¹ Thus, according to a catalogue compiled by I. J. Schmidt and Otto von Böhtlingk in 1848, approximately 500 Tibetan texts had made their way to the Asiatic Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, one of the main centers of European scholarship on Central and Inner Asia.Footnote ²² Given this relative paucity of material in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the relatively haphazard nature of its provenance, Schlagintweit's attempt to gain insight into Tibet's religious history was a ground-breaking enterprise and constituted a challenging and time-consuming undertaking.

Emil Schlagintweit's personal interest in Tibet at first stemmed not so much from philological activities, but instead arose from the scientific expedition his three older brothers had embarked on in 1854, which has been explored in depth by Moritz von Brescius.Footnote ²³ Adolphe, Hermann, and Robert Schlagintweit had set out to South Asia in 1854, with funding from the East India Company and Frederick William IV of Prussia, to explore large parts of Northern India, the Himalayas, and the Karakoram.Footnote ²⁴ They had received scientific backing from the doyen of German science, Alexander von Humboldt, and the scientific program they embarked on reflected the broad conception of science that Humboldt had encouraged throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ They collected reams of data on everything ranging from geological features to meteorological observations. Moreover, they collected specimens, made casts, and took measurements (including anthropometric measurements and casts of the indigenous population they encountered). After three years, Robert and Hermann returned to Europe, their brother Adolphe having been killed in Kashgar. They brought with them a collection comprising forty-five manuscript volumes, 2,000 specimens of rock, 1,400 specimens of soil, a zoological collection of skeletons and skins, 351 articles of native dress, a herbarium, various maps, in addition to having put up 172 stations of meteorological observation, painting 750 views and panoramas, and making 275 facial casts and thirty-eight casts of the hands and feet of “natives” they encountered.Footnote ²⁶ Over the following years they were promoted by the German press as true heroes—and in the case of Adolphe, martyr—of science and received prestigious honors such as the gold medal of the Paris Geographical Society.Footnote ²⁷ Their expedition became part of the canon of Asian exploration and made its way into novels and school textbooks, where the Schlagintweit expedition came to be listed together with the exploits of other famous explorers, such as Alexander von Humboldt, Ferdinand von Richthofen, and Sven Hedin.Footnote ²⁸

Once they had returned to Germany in 1857, the remaining brothers, Hermann and Robert, embarked upon the evaluation of their expedition, compiling a four-volume series of Results of a scientific mission to India and High Asia, which was published, in English, by Brockhaus (Leipzig) and Trübner (London) between the years 1861 and 1866.Footnote ²⁹ This task was a challenging undertaking, and Adolphe's death must have increased the workload for Hermann and Robert quite drastically. At the same time, their younger brother Emil was in the process of completing his studies in law at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, with a set of grades that were not sufficient for immediate entry into the civil service.Footnote ³⁰ Emil had occasionally provided logistical support for his brothers during their travels, liaising with sponsors such as Christian von Bunsen.Footnote ³¹ Consequently the most logical course of action was for Emil to assist his brothers in the evaluation of their collections. Emil's focus lay on the collection of manuscripts and objects of religious worship which his brothers had brought back with them. At some point in the late 1850s or very early 1860s, he began learning Tibetan, with the help of Franz Anton Schiefner, a Baltic German, who lived in St. Petersburg and taught philology and comparative linguistics, including Tibetan.Footnote ³² A few years later, in 1863, his Buddhism in Tibet appeared in print, followed in subsequent decades by a number of shorter pieces on Tibetan Buddhism and an illustrated two-volume book on India, written for a popular audience and entitled Indien in Wort und Bild (1880/1).Footnote ³³

The collection of objects and texts compiled by the Schlagintweit brothers significantly added to the source material on which scholars could draw. In analyzing the material, Schlagintweit adopted a peculiar medley of approaches and methodologies, combining philological analysis of textual sources with anecdotal evidence and synthesis of secondary sources. Correspondence between the Schlagintweit brothers and several publishing houses would suggest that Emil Schlagintweit's work was initially supposed to focus on the objects of religious worship in his brothers’ collection, as the original working title of his book (Objects of Buddhist Worship to illustrate the Buddhism of Tibet) stressed these far more than the title of the final publication. In the end, however, Schlagintweit's Buddhism in Tibet proved to be more ambitious than a simple description of objects and manuscripts. The book was split into two parts. The first dealt with the history of Buddhism, exploring first the development of Buddhism in South Asia and then the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet by the legendary kings Songtsen Gampo and Trisong Detsen.Footnote ³⁴ This section was for the most part a scholarly synthesis of existing knowledge on Tibetan Buddhism. Schlagintweit heavily relied on extant scholarship; in a few sections, however, he also drew on material his brothers had collected, for instance when he reproduced a translation of “an address to the Buddhas of confession” in Chapter 11.Footnote ³⁵

It was in the second part of the book, entitled “Present Lamaistic Institutions,” that Schlagintweit relied more heavily on his brothers’ collection of objects and on their personal recollections of their travels. Alongside descriptions of Tibetan objects of worship and works of art, this part relayed his brothers’ stories about religious festivals and rituals, as well as Tibetan diet and dress.Footnote ³⁶ It described, for instance, a feast that Robert Schlagintweit had been invited to in Leh in Ladakh and at which the food had apparently been “much better than could have been expected.”Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, Part II included an analysis of religious statues collected by the brothers Schlagintweit, in a chapter that compared the body measurements of these statues to those of actual people and concluded that statues of Buddhas resembled the physiognomy of South Asian “Aryans” while statues of dragsheds (deities supposed to ward off bad spirits) and lamas were much closer to Tibetans in terms of bodily proportions.Footnote ³⁸ The final two chapters dealt with the Tibetan system of reckoning time and of divining the future. The book was accompanied by an “atlas” containing twenty illustrations of Tibetan religious artwork and divination tables, which were used in Tibet to predict future events.Footnote ³⁹ The book therefore drew on a number of different approaches and combined scholarly synthesis of existing literature with the study of material culture and texts, as well as relaying anecdotal evidence on issues that would have only been of limited interest to serious philologists. It therefore did not fit neatly into any single clear “mold” of Orientalist scholarship.

Despite its scholarly focus, the book was not free from value judgments. If we think about the book in terms of the production of Orientalist discourse, Schlagintweit's analysis of Tibetan Buddhism reflected a popular nineteenth-century interpretation of Asian religions in general. While he wrote very positively about historical Buddhism, he was much more critical of contemporary Buddhist practice, which he believed to be marked by superstition and irrationality. These flaws, in turn, were supposedly responsible for the undemocratic character of nineteenth-century Tibet. He told his readers that Tibetan Buddhists followed their dogma to a different extent depending on whether they were “of vulgar capacities,” “in a middle degree of intellectual and moral capacity,” or “of the highest capacity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This, he claimed, allowed the upper strata of Tibetan society to dupe those less well-off and less well-educated. The teachings of the fourteenth/fifteenth-century reformer Tsongkhapa (who had “imposed upon himself the difficult task […] of eradicating the abuses gradually introduced by the priests, who had returned to the ordinary tricks and pretended miracles of charlatanism”) had been “considerably relaxed” in contemporary Tibet. As a result, Schlagintweit argued, “a considerable part of the priestly revenues is derived from rites of an emphatically shaman character, performed at the request of the lay population to drive off the evil spirits.”Footnote ⁴¹ According to Buddhism in Tibet, “the lamas are an idle set of people, disinclined to either bodily or mental exertion” and instead simply whiled away the hours “revolving prayer-cylinders or counting the beads of rosaries.”Footnote ⁴²

Comments such as these were not at all uncommon in nineteenth-century writings about Tibet and can, at least at first sight, be read as being motivated and underpinned by a belief in the superiority of European culture and modernity, as well as Protestantism. The supposedly undemocratic and irrational character of Tibetan Buddhism was something many commentators wrote about, quite frequently using this idea to draw parallels between Buddhism and Catholicism.Footnote ⁴³ Shortly before Schlagintweit's Buddhism, the young Hegelian Carl Friedrich Koeppen had published his two-volume Die Religion des Buddha, in which he referred to Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism as “intellectual charlatanry” and argued that Buddhism, while potentially a revolutionary and egalitarian force, had in actual fact had an “enslaving” effect on Asian politics.Footnote ⁴⁴ The differentiation between a “lofty” and “idealistic” traditional Buddhism and a more depraved modern variety was equally common and became even more pronounced in the later decades of the century. Laurence Austin Waddell, a British explorer, diplomat, and scholar, in his 1895 The Buddhism of Tibet, claimed that the “agnostic idealism and simple morality” of ancient Indian Buddhism had become “distorted” in Tibetan Buddhism through the introduction of the “yoga parasite […] which crushed and cankered most of the little life of purely Buddhist stock yet left in the Mahayana.”Footnote ⁴⁵

However, while it may be tempting to put these comments down to nothing more than malicious ignorance, embedded within a deeply Orientalist discourse present in much European writing on the Orient far beyond the realms of German academia, we also need to acknowledge that these comments demonstrate a second influence, more strongly rooted in German scholarly traditions: the pull of historicism which was beginning to replace the Romantic “search for origins” that had been at the heart of much writing about the Orient in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholarly interest gradually moved away from seeking to integrate “the East” into grand narratives of human civilization, towards tracing the historical development of other cultures and religions in their own right.Footnote ⁴⁶ While the comments resulting from these efforts were not always positive and still vested the authority to pass judgment in Western observers, they did nonetheless acknowledge that “the East” had a history of its own and was subject to the forces of political, economic and social development, just like “the West.”

Therefore, looking at the discourse produced by Schlagintweit and other nineteenth-century Tibetologists, we see that a nuanced interpretation of Orientalist scholarship is necessary. The scholarship of this period was indeed based on the assumption that contemporary Western culture was more progressive and rational, and scholars projected their own values and motivations onto the objects of their scholarship. Yet, we also need to remember that these writers were motivated by the desire to explore the historical development of Tibet on its own terms. Tibet, for them, was not a monolithic Orientalist fantasy; it was a region that possessed historically specific political, social, and cultural dynamics worth exploring.

German Orientalism? Wissenschaft and the Production of Knowledge

Having established that Schlagintweit was motivated by the desire to historicize Eastern religions we need to consider not just the results, but also the epistemologies and methodologies of this undertaking. One criticism Edward Said leveled at Western representations of the Orient was the fact that novelists, artists, and scholars could write about the Orient without ever having been to the region they were describing.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the same time, Kaushik Bagchi has suggested that, even when German Orientalists such as the Indologist Richard Garbe actually traveled to Asia, they did so after having already developed strong preconceived ideas of what they would encounter, and usually out of an attraction to the ancient history and culture of the places they traveled to, rather than a desire to experience their present-day realities.Footnote ⁴⁸ For many Orientalists, knowledge about the Orient did not come from an actual physical engagement with the place, but from a solid knowledge of textual sources and previous scholarship. As Robert Irwin has suggested, the scholarly work of Orientalists was based on “academic drudgery and close attention to philological detail.”Footnote ⁴⁹ If one follows this interpretation, neither local, indigenous knowledge nor fieldwork seem to have played much of a role in the construction of knowledge about the Orient. Historians such as Suzanne Marchand have argued that this was particularly the case for German Orientalists, given that Germany had no large overseas empire in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁰ British Orientalism frequently gained support from imperial officials, and in some cases imperial officials turned scholars themselves, creating a brand of Orientalism that was often suffused with assumptions and convictions drawn from the realities of imperial rule rather than from a close philological engagement with textual sources.Footnote ⁵¹ German Orientalists, on the other hand, could not count on the support of an imperial infrastructure and were rarely able to combine scholarship and official positions in the colonies. Thus, historians such as Sabine Mangold argue, they came to fetishize Wissenschaftlichkeit, or a peculiarly German approach to academic rigor that relied on a close reading of texts, involved painstaking analysis of grammar and syntax, prioritized thorough historicization of sources, and scorned both contemporary usefulness and any form of generalization.Footnote ⁵² This, according to Suzanne Marchand, resulted in “a semi-conscious division of labor: the English, British, and Dutch were to enjoy the fruits of present-day colonization, while the Germans profited by enhancing their Wissenschaftlichkeit.”Footnote ⁵³

This supposed obsession with Wissenschaftlichkeit was a consequence of the way in which Orientalist scholarship had developed in Germany during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In particular, it was drawn from a desire to legitimize what was a relatively new discipline. Orientalism had begun to diverge from classical scholarship, as well as theology, in the wake of the Creuzer Streit, which had erupted over Freiburg philologist Friedrich Creuzer's work on symbols and myth in the early part of the nineteenth century. Following this controversy, Orientalism needed to establish itself as a field in its own right.Footnote ⁵⁴ It did this by emphasizing methodological rigor in order to show that ancient non-European texts could be studied with the same commitment and thoroughness as the Greek and Latin texts that many classical scholars held to be the pinnacle of ancient civilization. Moreover, some scholars made use of the discourse of Wissenschaftlichkeit in order to legitimize the work of German academics in an age before German unification. The mid-nineteenth-century Arabist Gustav Flügel, for instance, contrasted English, French, Dutch, Russian, and Italian scholarship with that of the “diligent Germans with a thirst for knowledge.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This interpretation effectively constituted an assertion of the value of German scholarship at a time when nationalism was a strong force in German universities and when more and more scholars were dissatisfied with the fact that many Germans interested in the study of the “Orient” had left Germany to pursue their academic ambitions abroad, particularly in France.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, German Orientalist traditions had developed in a context that was quite different from approaches developed in Britain and France, creating particular German obsessions and sensibilities.

The case of Emil Schlagintweit, however, working in a space between academic and non-academic traditions, draws attention to the fact that not all Orientalist scholarship in Germany fits the picture outlined so far very neatly. In many ways, of course, a rigorous engagement with textual sources and existing scholarship were indeed extremely important for Schlagintweit. Much of the first part of Buddhism in Tibet consisted of a synthesis of existing scholarship, drawing on the work of well-known Tibetologists and Buddhologists. He provided a synthesis of the works of eminent scholars of Buddhism, such as Eugène Burnouf and Wassili Wassiljew, scholars of Tibetan, such as I. J. Schmidt, Franz Anton Schiefner, and Csoma de Körös, and scholar-explorers such as Alexander Cunningham and Brian Houghton Hodgson.Footnote ⁵⁷ His papers contain notes that reveal a thorough engagement with these works, and his correspondence demonstrates that, over the course of the following decades, Schlagintweit engaged in scholarly debates over particular issues of interpretation.Footnote ⁵⁸

Schlagintweit's engagement in debates over specific points of interpretation continued beyond the publication of Buddhism in Tibet. He became increasingly proficient in Tibetan and began working towards the publication of further scholarly material. Between 1866 and 1903 he published translations and editions of a work on the history of Tibetan kings, a description of the life of the legendary Tibetan teacher Padmasambhava, and a study of Tibetan chronology.Footnote ⁵⁹ His notes also show conversations with other scholars, for instance comparing different editions of Tibetan texts, and pointing out the differences between several versions of the Kangyur, the Tibetan “Bible.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Around the turn of the century, he discussed his interpretation of the Tibetan Gesar epic with August Hermann Francke, a missionary and prominent scholar of Western Tibetan history. Francke had published parts of the epic, a classic of Tibetan literature dating from the twelfth century, and Schlagintweit and Francke had come to disagree over the question whether Gesar was in fact a historical personality.Footnote ⁶¹ While Schlagintweit believed this to be the case, Francke was convinced that Gesar was a representation of a god of the seasons, rather than an actual person.Footnote ⁶² Francke, rather pointedly, argued that “[he] too would be interested in currying favor with the learned world by purporting historicizing theories” but that he was unable to do so since he felt “compelled to give honor to the truth, in contradiction to almost the entire learned world, by asserting the seasons theory.”Footnote ⁶³ Schlagintweit, in turn, relied on Albert Grünwedel, who called Francke's theories “malicious” and criticized the fact that Francke had only published a small selection of fragments of the epic.Footnote ⁶⁴ Schlagintweit (and Grünwedel) clearly believed in the explanatory power of the historicist approaches developed in German academia. He also demanded the systematic, thorough approach required of a German Wissenschaftler, calling for a study of complete texts, rather than selected extracts, and cautioning against premature conclusions. Thus, even though he was not working in a university or research institute, Schlagintweit's writings and correspondence suggest a commitment to wissenschaftlich philological scholarship and to a close engagement with historical-literary sources.

However, there was more to Schlagintweit's work than this, and his attitude towards local, indigenous knowledge was more complex than traditional interpretations of German Orientalism would suggest. The extent to which Europeans drew on the knowledge of local populations in colonial and quasi-colonial territories has attracted more scholarly attention in recent years, with new research pointing to the multiple ways in which the relationship between colonizers and colonized was characterized by both collaboration and resistance.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Schlagintweit, local knowledge was, in principle, of limited value; however this is not to say that he did not make use of it in his endeavors to explore the history and contemporary practice of Tibetan Buddhism. On the one hand, his belief that most practitioners of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism were incapable of grasping the intricacies of their own faith or language led him to conclude that their expertise was not particularly useful. He reminded his readers that “the illiterateness of the Lamas has often been regretted” and dismissively commented that “although every Lama can read and write, yet these accomplishments form no favorite occupation among them.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This seemed to be at least partly confirmed by exchanges Schlagintweit had with other Europeans who had lived and traveled in Central and South Asia. In an exchange of letters between Schlagintweit and the Moravian missionary Heinrich August Jäschke, for instance, the latter warned Schlagintweit that he had not met a single lama with the ability to distinguish between different grammatical cases in the Tibetan language. Tibetans’ approach to their own language, Jäschke warned, was based on routine and on listening, rather than on a conscious, systematic engagement with grammar and spelling as demanded by German philologists. Jäschke therefore encouraged Schlagintweit to trust in his own “knowledge of the language” when translating and editing texts and to account for the fact that he might encounter grammatical mistakes, particularly in recent texts from Western Tibet.Footnote ⁶⁷

However, certain individuals, in Schlagintweit's estimation, could nonetheless provide valuable assistance in helping to explore Tibetan texts, particularly while Schlagintweit's own knowledge of Tibetan was still limited. His brothers had frequently relied on “native” informants and guides when completing their surveys and compiling their collections.Footnote ⁶⁸ This also held true for the collection of Tibetan texts and religious objects, many of which were in the possession of various monasteries and therefore had to be procured with the help of Chibu Lama, a Sikkimese of Tibetan origin, who had distinguished himself by serving as “a friend to the English” and political agent for the Raja/chogyal of Sikkim in Darjeeling. Chibu Lama's help was of use in the procurement of sources, rather than in their analysis and evaluation. However, there is evidence that Schlagintweit's engagement with non-European expertise went further. In addition to Chibu Lama, Schlagintweit also benefited greatly from the help of a Buryat called Galsang Gomboev, who resided in St. Petersburg. Having been born around 1819, Gomboev had grown up in Timni District near Selenginsk (near Lake Baikal), before being called to teach Mongolian at Kazan University from 1842 and at the Faculty of Oriental Languages in St. Petersburg from 1856.Footnote ⁶⁹ Schiefner had introduced Gomboev to Schlagintweit in 1861 as a “treasure trove for knowledge on Buryat life” and, more importantly perhaps, as someone who was “not money-minded” and would therefore provide affordable assistance in the interpretation of Buddhist texts.Footnote ⁷⁰ What made Gomboev an acceptable collaborator was the fact that one could hope for an approach from him that was both informed by first-hand experience and satisfied academic demands for Wissenschaftlichkeit, given that he had been working as a lecturer at St. Petersburg University since the mid-1850s. Gomboev had himself published translations and editions of Mongolian texts and had worked with Western scholars and museums. Over the course of the early 1860s Schlagintweit corresponded with Gomboev through Schiefner, with Gomboev translating Tibetan texts into Russian, and this assistance was freely acknowledged by Schlagintweit in his book.Footnote ⁷¹

In sum, Schlagintweit did indeed emphasize Wissenschaftlichkeit in his approach to his work. He was a thorough scholar, who engaged in careful reading of historical sources. This meant that he at times heeded advice to disregard indigenous knowledge, since it supposedly did not meet the “standards” of philological scholarship which Schlagintweit tried to live up to, as it was based on the real-life use of language rather than its theoretical or textual study. However, it is equally important to bear in mind that the experiential knowledge of non-European individuals could nonetheless become useful and much less problematic if these individuals acted as scholars or, in the case of Chibu Lama, as diplomats—that is if they acted in a way that was familiar to European scholarly audiences and in line with their expectations of professional interactions. Wissenschaftlichkeit thus became a global goal that could, in the appropriate circumstances, transcend racial and cultural boundaries and could, in the minds of scholars such as Schlagintweit, be supplemented with anecdotal knowledge acquired through a less scholarly form of engagement. The approaches used by German Orientalists, in this sense, were perhaps not as different from those of their colleagues in other countries, and indeed not as purist, as one might think.

Networks and Audiences

What further complicates the idea that the approach of Orientalists from nations without an empire was different from the approach of scholars from nations with an empire, is the fact that this scholarship took place within the context of professional networks that transcended national borders with great regularity. One of the most famous scholars of South Asian languages and religion, Friedrich Max Müller, is a case in point here: having been born and educated in Germany, Müller moved to Britain in the 1840s, where he eventually took up a chair at the University of Oxford. Through his work in Britain, in turn, he not only influenced other British scholars but also German Indologists, such as Paul Deussen, who in turn was well-connected with a range of scholars, including the Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda.Footnote ⁷² This and other examples of a wider “global history of entanglements” have been explored by historians such as Michael Bergunder, Kris Manjapra, and Perry Myers, and attest to the well-developed wider global networks within which German scholars of Buddhism and South Asia were working.Footnote ⁷³

Schlagintweit's work fits into this wider context, and his remaining correspondence in the Bavarian State Library demonstrates the full range of contacts Schlagintweit had amongst scholars, libraries, museums, publishers, and many other individuals all over the world. In the last decade of his life, for instance, he exchanged notes on various new developments in scholarship with the German Orientalist Georg Huth, read and commented on drafts of the Tibetan dictionary produced by the Bengali scholar-spy Sarat Chandra Das, and discussed collections of Tibetan writings with the British India Office librarian (and later Oxford professor of Sanskrit) Frederick William Thomas, to cite just a few examples.Footnote ⁷⁴ The fact that Tibetology was a relatively small field of course increased the urgency of working across national borders, and Schlagintweit frequently shared information and advice with scholars working in other parts of the world. Shortly before his death he had prepared a letter to the Dalai Lama, asking for a number of Tibetan texts to be sent to Europe in order to aid Western scholarship on Tibet. This letter was drafted by Sarat Chandra Das and was sent via the German embassy in Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry, and the Chinese amban (representative) in Lhasa. Das himself had been one in a series of pundits, starting with Nain Singh, who had been trained by Schlagintweit's brothers in the 1850s, and shared “deep religious, historical and philological interests” with Emil Schlagintweit, whose book he referred to as an “excellent handbook.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Contact with the Chinese authorities had been brokered by the American scholar and explorer William W. Rockhill, with whom Schlagintweit had made contact through the American envoy E. H. Conger, whom Schlagintweit's cousin Albert Schlagintweit (styled Albert S. White) had met on board a ship.Footnote ⁷⁶ While Schlagintweit never received an answer, not least due to the fact that the Dalai Lama had fled from Lhasa following the British invasion of his country, this episode demonstrates once again how important a range of transnational contacts and networks were for German scholars.

This kind of collaboration across national borders (at a time when some of these borders were still relatively recent) was not exceptional. In fact, the works of many scholars and travelers pay testament to the fact that individuals from all sorts of national and trans-national backgrounds supported each other. The acknowledgments to the first Tibetan-English dictionary by Csoma de Körös, for instance, reveal the full range of individuals who had assisted Csoma. In addition to various Britons in India, Csoma acknowledged “the kind and generous treatment [..] from two French officers, Messieurs Allard and Ventura, now of high rank, in the service of the Mahá Rájá Renjit Sing, at Lahore; from Mr. Ignatz Pohle, a Merchant of Bohemia, at Aleppo; and, upon his kind recommendation, from his agent at Bagdad, Mr. Anton Swoboda, of Hungary; from Mr. Bellino of Vienna, Secretary to the late Mr. Rich, Resident at Bagdad (then in Curdistan). And lastly, from a good-hearted man, Jos. Scháfer [sic], of Tyrol, a Smith by profession, at Alexandria, in Egypt.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Scholarship on Tibet, in other words, may have been the result of careful philological work, but also always relied on contact with a wide variety of people of many different nationalities and professions.

Beyond Tibet, too, interpreting the second half of the nineteenth century primarily as an age of different national academic cultures ignores the fact that there was a great degree of mobility amongst scholars across all disciplines. International conferences and international research expeditions were by no means uncommon, and even though national differences could become noticeable at times, they did not necessarily preclude scholars from different countries working together closely.Footnote ⁷⁸ Michael Bergunder's study of the relationship between Max Müller (German-educated but working in Oxford) and Paul Deussen is an interesting example of this dynamic. Both scholars worked on the Advaita Vedanta, which they regarded as the most important Indian tradition and utilized to shape an entire philosophy of religion. International congresses, such as the eighth International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm and Christiana in 1889 and its follow-up congress in London in 1892 provided the two with opportunities to meet, share their interpretations, and encourage each other. Learned societies, too, provided further opportunities to disseminate and share knowledge, for example when Deussen presented a modified position at a lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society in Bengal, which was later published and read by Müller, who in turn went on to praise Deussen at a series of lectures to the Royal Institution in London.Footnote ⁷⁹ While Schlagintweit's “day job” as a civil servant meant that he was probably less flexible than university scholars in attending international congresses, his membership in relevant learned societies nevertheless allowed him, too, to participate in the networks that Müller, Deussen, and many others were part of. By the time he published Indien in Wort und Bild, for example, Schlagintweit was a member of the Academy of Sciences in both Munich and Lisbon, as well as a member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London and in Calcutta.Footnote ⁸⁰

Moreover, it is important to remember that Schlagintweit worked in a world where scholarly books were written with an international audience in mind and were received well beyond the home nation of their author. Schlagintweit's book, just like the Results compiled by his brothers, was written in English and published simultaneously in Germany and Britain. Reviews of Buddhism in Tibet appeared in journals and newspapers in Germany, Austria, France, and Britain. In 1881 the book was translated into French.Footnote ⁸¹ (A Japanese translation followed in the 1950s.)Footnote ⁸² Moreover, it becomes clear from his correspondence, that the need to attract international audiences was indeed a consideration for those engaged in Tibetological scholarship—particularly given that Tibetology was usually regarded as a “niche” discipline. In this context, Moravian missionary Jäschke, who was working on a Tibetan-German dictionary, told Schlagintweit that he regretted his poor command of the English language, since he suspected that he would be able to reach a wider audience if he was able to publish in English. On the flipside, Jäschke suggested, German-language publications were more popular on the Russian market.Footnote ⁸³

Given this international market, Schlagintweit's publications had an impact that went well beyond German borders. His work formed the basis of further scholarship produced in Europe and North America and influenced a number of scholarly and non-scholarly authors. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Russian-born theosophist living in Britain and the USA, believed that Tibet was home to large undiscovered libraries holding eternal wisdoms and copied several passages of Schlagintweit's book almost verbatim in her own publications.Footnote ⁸⁴ More scholarly writers were particularly impressed by Schlagintweit's expertise on the contemporary practice of Tibetan Buddhism and by his research on the Tibetan calendar and divination tables.Footnote ⁸⁵ In some cases this was even true for findings that later turned out to be wrong or misleading. The German-born American Sinologist Berthold Laufer, for instance, lamented in 1913 that far too many scholars had trusted Schlagintweit's mistaken interpretation of the Tibetan calendar.Footnote ⁸⁶ Regardless of the accuracy (or otherwise) of Schlagintweit's research, the reception of his work demonstrates that the practice of Orientalism was not contained within national borders. There may have been a particularly strong commitment to Wissenschaftlichkeit in Germany, yet any particular “Germanness” in his approach should not obscure the fact that Orientalist scholarship was both produced and consumed in a way that cannot easily be categorized through reference to specific national traditions.

Finally, Schlagintweit's case also shows that a commitment to Wissenschaftlichkeit on the part of German scholars did not mean that these scholars did not write for a variety of different audiences and acted in several different institutional settings at the same time, particularly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The mix of civil service position and scholarship, so common amongst British Orientalists, for instance, was perhaps not as uncommon as often thought in the case of German Orientalists—even if the practicalities of such arrangements were obviously different. From the 1860s up until his death, Schlagintweit was certainly not the kind of scholar described by Lord Acton when he claimed that Germans worked “by extreme patience and self-control, by seeking neither premature results nor personal reward, by sacrificing the present to the far-off future.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Instead, he was scholar, popular author, and civil servant at the same time. Schlagintweit had studied law and had obtained a doctorate in the subject in 1863, preparing him for a career in the Bavarian civil service at a time when that civil service was becoming an increasingly professionalized and “modern” administration.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet, despite his primary occupation as a civil servant, he was able to pursue rigorous philological scholarship and be meticulous in his analysis of texts and material culture, and capable of writing for a wider audience. His two-volume Indien in Wort und Bild was a well-produced, appealingly illustrated description of the Indian subcontinent, written predominantly for a lay audience.Footnote ⁸⁹ Moreover, he frequently wrote short articles for a variety of newspapers, explaining Asian politics, culture, and geography.Footnote ⁹⁰ At one point the non-academic audience for his expertise on Tibet even included German royalty: When in 1888 Georg of Prussia paid a visit to Zweibrücken, Schlagintweit's private notes on the occasion reveal that the prince questioned him not only on the royal portraits in the local museum, but also about Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, and the development of mountaineering.Footnote ⁹¹

Thus, while broadly speaking there is some truth to the assertion that German Orientalism differed from Orientalist discourses and practices in other parts of Europe and placed particular emphasis on Wissenschaftlichkeit, the case of Emil Schlagintweit also shows that the picture was often more complex than this. German Orientalists did value close attention to philological detail and rigorous engagement with historical textual sources, but they also formed part of transnational scholarly networks that complicate any clear-cut differentiation between the Orientalist scholarship produced in Germany and that generated in other European countries. Their relationship with different kinds of scholarly and non-scholarly audiences could also be more nuanced than one might at first suspect. Scholars such as Schlagintweit wrote for audiences across Europe and North America, with books being translated and reviewed well beyond the author's country of origin. Finally, anecdotal evidence and philological scholarship were combined in works that could appeal not only to academic audiences, but which could attract a wider reading public.

Tibetological Knowledge and the Realities of Empire

The fact that Schlagintweit combined his scholarly work with his career as a civil servant should also remind us that scholarship did not exist in a political vacuum. Edward Said famously proposed that there was a close link between European Orientalism and imperial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁹² Said's focus on British and French representations of the Orient lent itself quite easily to this observation, and there is certainly much truth in the assertion that the British and French imperial enterprises involved an army of scholars as well as novelists, poets, and artists, who created archives of imperial knowledge and sometimes popularized imperial ventures in the metropole.Footnote ⁹³ However, as John MacKenzie has pointed out, the link between representation and agency in the context of Orientalist scholarship needs to be examined more closely if we truly wish to understand how useful the work of ethnographers, philologists, anthropologists, and other scholars was for imperial administrators.Footnote ⁹⁴ As a number of historians writing after Said have reminded us, Orientalist scholarship was not always confined to those nations that possessed an actual overseas empire.Footnote ⁹⁵ Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Russian Empire, above all, produced Orientalist scholars despite not being engaged in the same process of overseas imperial expansion as Britain and France—at least not until quite late in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁶ The relationship between Orientalism and imperial realities was by no means clear-cut.

It is useful to think of the relationship between scholarship, imperial realities, and European politico-cultural preoccupations in two ways: as a matter of scholarship being directly and explicitly used by imperial administrators, on the one hand, and one of scholarship spurring on an imperial imagination or imperial ambitions, on the other. In this context, Tibetology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a particularly instructive case. Tibet did not form part of any European empire but occupied a position of potential strategic importance between Britain's South Asian empire in the South and the Russian empire in the North. Moreover, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, some British merchants and administrators in India had expressed concerns over Chinese commercial influence in Tibet and considered it worthwhile to open the region up to more trade from British India. According to J. A. H. Louis, for instance, writing in 1894, the presence of British merchants and tea planters on the Tibetan border was desirable because it would demonstrate to the Tibetans “the meaning of the Pax Britannica.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Tibet also occupied a key place in Britain's and Russia's “Great Game” for influence in Central and Inner Asia.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Tibetan government, in the late nineteenth century, showed little interest in maintaining any sort of diplomatic relations with the British, which only served to exacerbate British fears that Tibet might fall prey to Russian influence. Lord Curzon, as Viceroy of India, therefore began to lobby the British government to adopt a more forceful approach, and in 1903 a military expedition was launched under the leadership of Francis Younghusband. This expedition crossed the border into Tibet and advanced all the way to the Tibetan capital Lhasa, where the Tibetan government were forced to sign a punitive peace treaty, agreeing to pay a large sum of money as an indemnity and to open parts of Tibet up to British (Indian) trade.Footnote ⁹⁹ While the British government soon lost interest in Tibet, following the election of the Liberal government headed by Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the late nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth century therefore constituted a period in which Tibet formed a part of British imperial ambitions and the British imperial imagination.

One might consequently expect British imperial civil servants and administrators to have drawn on the knowledge which the transnational networks of Tibetologists described above had produced about Tibet. Yet, the actual reality of British imperialism was more complex than a simple formula equating Orientalist scholarship with practical application in imperial administration might suggest, and Emil Schlagintweit's work again lets us arrive at a more nuanced understanding. On the surface, Schlagintweit's scholarship seems to have been of little practical use, and few imperial administrators seemed interested in the knowledge he produced, despite the very real strategic significance of the region at the time. The main reason for this seems to have been precisely Schlagintweit's focus on Wissenschaftlichkeit and academic rigor, outlined in the previous section. Throughout the later years of his life Schlagintweit was working on a Tibetan dictionary, parts of which can still be found in the papers he left behind after his death.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Moreover, he assisted members of the Moravian missionary community in Ladakh in compiling a German-Tibetan dictionary.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Given that communication with Tibetan individuals was a necessary pre-requisite for British negotiations with the Tibetan government, one might expect there to have been some interest in Schlagintweit's work on the part of imperial officials—yet this was not the case. In 1873 Moravian missionary Heinrich August Jäschke wrote to Schlagintweit informing him that Dr. Reinhold Rost, the German Chief Librarian of the India Office, had shown interest in an English version of his German-Tibetan dictionary.Footnote ¹⁰² However, Jäschke also expressed concerns that his command of the English language was insufficient for this task. Yet, when Schlagintweit offered his help with the project, Jäschke politely turned down his offer, citing as his reason advice he had received from his contacts in Britain: “a dict.y. [sic—dictionary] purely scientific, or even very prominently scientific, with comparatively little regard to the practical purpose of a dict.y. for general use for men of moderate scientific tendencies & attainments, would not be as welcome to the practical gentleman of the Govt. as a work in which you have kept in view its constant use for missionaries.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Schlagintweit's thorough and methodical way of working was simply too slow in producing tangible results and was, in the minds of imperial officials, not likely to be sufficiently useful to merchants and missionaries in their day-to-day lives. Imperial administrators wanted Tibetological scholarship to be, above all, practical and straightforward—attributes that conflicted directly with the desire of scholars to produce sound and rigorous academic work.

Interest in Tibetological scholarship thus remained limited, and the potential “imperial archive” of knowledge and sources on Tibet that Schlagintweit and other scholars were compiling never commanded much attention. Even in 1904, at the supposed height of interest in Tibet, following the Younghusband expedition, Albert Grünwedel, one of the most influential German Tibetologists of the early twentieth century, complained to Schlagintweit that a major collection of Tibetan sources in Berlin was in a state of disarray, unknown and unused:

Similarly, when Schlagintweit attempted to sell large parts of the collections his brothers had accumulated, following the deaths of Hermann in 1882 and Robert in 1885, and in the wake of a financial crisis for the family, he found it difficult to elicit interest on the part of museums, libraries, and learned societies. His collection of Tibetan writings, for instance, was eventually bought by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where it remains to the present day.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, the librarian, with whom he had been put in contact by the famous Oxford philologist Friedrich Max Müller, was less than enthusiastic. Edward Nicholson warned Schlagintweit that the Bodleian was only prepared to spend £120 on purchasing the manuscripts, and that this offer was final, with no room for negotiations under any circumstances.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When Schlagintweit inquired whether it would be possible to produce an English-language catalogue of the manuscripts, Nicholson informed him that it was unlikely that any publisher would be willing to pay for such an undertaking.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Other institutions were just as unenthusiastic. The India Office was not prepared to make an offer for the collection and added that, in their estimation, there were only two people in Britain who were able to read Tibetan and would be interested in the material—and one of them was going blind.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such a blunt rejection, at a time when the northern border of the British empire in India was far from stable, would seem to suggest that not all Orientalist scholarship was automatically considered helpful, or useful, to the imperial enterprise.

Nonetheless, Schlagintweit's work formed part of a wider archive of works that presented imperialism as a positive force to German and international audiences and therefore contributed to the formation of an imperial imagination, either specifically within Germany or more broadly across the West. With regard to German writings about South Asian religions, this dynamic has already been explored by historians such as Perry Myers, who has focused on how commentators such as Christian Hönes and Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden used their work on South Asian religions to suggest that Britain had failed in its mission as a colonizer and that, instead, a German colonialism that involved visions of spiritual renewal would be much better suited to South Asia.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This dynamic was also apparent in the literature produced on Buddhism, which Schlagintweit's publications were a part of. From the late nineteenth century onwards, there was increasing interest in Buddhism among German audiences, but approaches and motivations varied considerably. While the academic study of Buddhist texts may have contributed to knowledge about South and East Asia more generally, many commentators also used their writings on Buddhism to demonstrate a range of points related to European culture and politics. They made implicit or explicit criticisms of Catholicism and thus reinforced the supposed superiority of a culturally Protestant Germany with colonial ambitions (for example in the case of one of the best-known German scholars on Buddhism, Hermann Oldenberg); they reaffirmed the necessity for Christian (and specifically Catholic) missionary activity (in the case of the Jesuit Sanskrit scholar Joseph Dahlmann); or they developed new approaches to religion in the face of a perceived Western materialism (in the case of Paul Deussen).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Around the turn of the century, this also resulted in a small number of commentators becoming interested in the active practice of Buddhism, most notably the German medic Paul Dahlke, who eventually founded Germany's first Buddhist temple in the 1920s.Footnote ¹¹¹

Schlagintweit expressed no reservations about the usefulness of imperial rule and, unlike some of the writers mentioned above, was generally positively disposed towards British presence in India. In fact, in his publications he complimented British administrators on having brought civilization and stability to the Indian subcontinent. While in his book Indien in Wort und Bild he acknowledged that “ruthlessness” had not always been unavoidable in the exercise of imperial rule, he also told his readers that “conflicts had been solved with generosity and selflessness.” The British empire, for Schlagintweit, was a “monument of the highest energy and never-slackening vigor,” and its administration was “certainly judicious, liberal and just.”Footnote ¹¹² Schlagintweit effectively seems to have bought into the justification advanced by many of his contemporaries that empire was a civilizing mission. His positive attitude towards British imperialism may at least partly have been motivated by practical considerations, given that non-British travelers interested in Tibet (including his brothers in the 1850s) frequently relied on British mediation and good will to obtain access to Tibet or to Tibetan materials.Footnote ¹¹³ Explaining Schlagintweit's commitment to imperialism as a result of a practically-minded opportunism, however, only gets us so far. Indien in Wort und Bild was written for a German-speaking audience, and there was little need to praise British imperial rule in this context. Moreover, one might expect Schlagintweit to have been less enthusiastic about British imperial ambitions, given that, in the 1850s, British commentators had mocked his brothers as social up-starts and had criticized them for being duplicitous when they took their collections with them to Germany rather than handing them over to their British sponsors.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, the negative press coverage his brothers attracted in Britain does not seem to have dented Emil Schlagintweit's support for British imperialism in principle. In light of this it seems safe to assume that Schlagintweit's praise for the work of British imperial civil servants was quite genuine.

Furthermore, while Schlagintweit's popular works were not necessarily of direct use to imperial administrators, they nonetheless contributed to an increasing popular awareness of the role of empires in the late nineteenth-century world and created a place for empire in the minds of ordinary readers in Germany at a time when Germany's colonial ambitions were growing.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As Moritz von Brescius has suggested, while scholars certainly shared an awareness of academic literature being published across Europe, the same was not necessarily true for a wider general reading public.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The wider reading public of late nineteenth-century Germany, therefore, was more likely to become acquainted with the potential relevance of other parts of the world from books written for a popular audience, such as Schlagintweit's Indien in Wort und Bild.

Thus, the link between Orientalist scholarship and imperial agency was more complex than it would at first appear. While there was some interest in acquiring knowledge about Tibet in the wake of increasing strategic interest in the region on the part of the British government, and while scholars such as Schlagintweit expressed support for the idea that imperialism constituted a civilizing mission, the “real-life” value of Tibetological scholarship for the British imperial enterprise was low. Imperial administrators wanted knowledge that was practical and available quickly. Schlagintweit's scholarship was of comparatively little importance for British imperialism—despite the fact that, as we have seen, he was perhaps less “wissenschaftlich” than common interpretations of German Orientalism suggest, he was still too academic for imperial administrators. Consequently, it was administrators and civil servants “in the field” that ended up producing the dictionaries, phrasebooks, and grammars required for their work. Charles Alfred Bell, who led a British mission to Tibet in 1920, for instance, produced a dictionary containing conversation exercises and such useful phrases as “Bring tea at five o'clock.” and “Please arrange for the dandywala to come to me for an hour every day.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The relevance of Schlagintweit's work, as far as imperial ambitions were concerned, lay predominantly in contributing to the creation of an imperial imagination within the context of Germany's relatively late appearance on the colonial stage.