Agvan Dorzhiev

Dorzhiev was born in 1854 at Khara-Shibir in Transbaikalia, in a Buryat community that had been Buddhist for a century and a half and that belonged to the Russian empire. He went to Lhasa as a young man, entered Gomang college at Drepung, and took the lharampa degree, the highest in the Gelug curriculum, which almost no foreigner had done. He then became one of the assistants who debate with the Dalai Lama as part of his training, and he stayed close to the thirteenth Dalai Lama for the rest of that ruler's life.

Being a Russian subject at the centre of the Tibetan government at the end of the nineteenth century made him a political object whether he wanted to be one or not. He travelled repeatedly between Lhasa and St Petersburg, was received by Nicholas II, and argued in Tibet that Russia might be a counterweight to Britain and in Russia that Tibet was worth an interest. British intelligence read this as the advance of a Russian protectorate, and it was among the reasons given for the Younghusband expedition, which invaded Tibet in 1903 and 1904.

How much substance lay behind the alarm is still argued about. The Russian commitment was slighter than London believed, and Dorzhiev appears to have been doing more of the work of the relationship than either government was.

His durable achievement was built in Russia. From 1909 he raised money and permission for a Buddhist temple in St Petersburg, at Staraya Derevnya, designed in a Tibetan idiom by Russian architects with stained glass by Nicholas Roerich. It was consecrated in 1915, the first Buddhist temple in a European capital, and it was intended as a statement that Buddhism belonged inside the empire rather than at its edge.

After the revolution he tried to make the same case to the new state. He led the movement for a renovated Buddhism in Buryatia and Kalmykia, arguing that monastic discipline and the Buddhist refusal of a creator god were compatible with the Soviet programme, and for a decade the argument was tolerated. It stopped being tolerated at the end of the 1920s. The datsans were closed and demolished through the 1930s, the monks were arrested, and the St Petersburg temple was taken over and used at various points as a physical culture facility and a radio transmitter station.

Dorzhiev was arrested at Ulan-Ude in 1937, at eighty-three, and died in the prison hospital there in January 1938. The temple was returned to Buddhist use in 1990, and the datsans of Buryatia were rebuilt after that, largely from photographs and from memory.