Peter Badmayev

Peter Badmayev (Russian: Пётр Александрович Бадмаев: Pyotr Aleksandrovich Badmayev) (born ca. 1850 as Zhamsaran, died 1920 or 1923 ) was an ethnic Buryat Mongol who 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.

Badmayev came from a Buddhist family, and his elder brother was Alexander Badmayev, a doctor of Tibetan medicine whose skills so impressed Alexander II that the tsar allowed him to practice in St. Petersburg. Peter converted to Orthodoxy after he became Alexander III’s godson and trained as an Orientalist and doctor. He served for many years in the Asia department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He then worked as a physician from 1875 to the end of his life. The members of the royal family were among his patients.

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 University, 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 rage in the upper reaches of Russian society at that time, and Badmayev translated the Tibetan Gyushi.

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.

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