The scholar, spy and explorer extraordinaire, Sarat Chandra Das, a trained Bengali civil engineer ventured into Tibet on secret missions but came back a renowned Buddhist scholar who, among other works, ended up writing a 1000-page Tibetan-English dictionary.
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Born in Chittagong, eastern Bengal to a Hindu family, Sarat Chandra Das attended Presidency College, as a student of the University of Calcutta. In 1874 he was appointed headmaster of the Bhutia Boarding School at Darjeeling.
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Sarat Chandra Das once applied himself with characteristic energy to the study of the Tibetan language, and established friendly relations with the Raja of Sikkim and many of the leading lamas in that country, to which he made several short trips in the succeeding years.
In 1878, a passport was also brought to Sarat Chandra by the lama Ugyen-gyatso, issued to him by the Prime Minister, by which a choice of roads to enter Tibet was given him, and his safe conduct insured to Shigatse.
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Armed with these credentials, in June 1879, Das and Ugyen-gyatso left Darjeeling for the first of two journeys to Tibet. They remained in Tibet for six months.
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The guest of the Prime Minister, with whose assistance he was able to make a careful examination of the rich collections of books in the great libraries of the convent, bringing back with him to India a large and valuable collection of works in Sanskrit and Tibetan

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He also explored during this journey the country north and north-east of Kanchenjunga, of which nothing was previously known, noting with great care observations of bearing and distances.
He established friendly relations with the liberal and powerful Prime Minister, who was deeply interested in western civilization and it’s discoveries, of which he had learned much from the mouth of Sarat Chandra, requested him to come back again to Tashilhunpo.
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An account of his first journey was printed by the Bengal Government some time after the author’s return, with a prefatory note by the traveller’s friend, Sir Alfred Croft.
As the route therein described is the same as that followed by the traveler in his second and more extended journey of 1881-82, and as the results of his studies in Tibet in 1879, as shown in this report, bear nearly exclusively on historical and religious subjects
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It has been deemed advisable to omit it from the present publication, embodying in footnotes all such details as have been found in it bearing on the geography and ethnology of Tibet, and which are not in the later and fuller report.
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Sarat Chandra spent 1880 at his home in Darjiling, working on papers on the history, religion, ethnology, and folk-lore of Tibet, drawn from the data collected during his journey.
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These papers, most of them of great value to Oriental students, have since appeared in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society and in that of the Buddhist Text Society of India, which Sarat Chandra founded in 1892, and of which he has since remained the secretary.
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In November 1881, Sarat Chandra and Ugyen-gyatso returned to Tibet, where they explored the Yarlung Valley, where Tibetan civilization is said to have first made its appearance and returned to India in January 1883.
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Research and Scholarly Credits: A JOURNEY TO LHASA AND CENTRAL TIBET by SARAT CHANDEA DAS, of the Bengal Educational Service, Member of the Asiatic Society, Bengal, etc. EDITED BY THE HON. W. W. EOCKHILL, SECOND EDITION, REVISED.

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