Pelliot's expedition left Paris on June 17, 1906. His 3-man team included Dr. Louis Vaillant, an Army medical officer, and Charles Nouette, a photographer. The three traveled to Chinese Turkestan by rail through Moscow and Tashkent. The team arrived in Kashgar at the end of August, staying with the Russian consul-general (the successor to Nikolai Petrovsky). Pelliot amazed the local Chinese officials with his fluent Chinese (only one of the 13 languages he spoke). His efforts were to pay off shortly, when his team began obtaining supplies (like a yurt ...
Pelliot returned to Paris on October 24, 1909, to a vicious smear campaign mounted against himself, Edouard Chavannes (a fellow sinologist) and the staff of the Ecole. Pelliot was accused of wasting public money and returning with forged manuscripts. This campaign came to a head with a December 1910 article in La Revue Indigène by M. Fernand Farjenel. These charges were not proved false until Sir Aurel Stein's book, Ruins of Desert Cathay, appeared in 1912. In his book, Stein made it clear that he had left manuscripts behind in Tun-huang. Stei ...
