‘Buddhist Pilgrim at the Sacred Places of Tibet’ is a book-report on the travel of the author to Tibet in 1899-1902; G. Ts. Tsybikov was well-known orientalist, specialist in the Buddhist studies, ethnographer, and statesman. The travel was made just after the graduation from the St. Petersburg University on the recommendation of his supervisor – Professor A. M. Posdneev. The book was published for the first time in 1919. The travel was organized for the account of the Russian Geographical Society. The scholar went as a common Buryat-pilgrim. The travel took 888 days. The main task was ‘to study and to acquire original Tibetan compositions’. In the course of his travel, Ts. kept his diary, which laid the foundation of his book.
Unlike his predecessors, Ts. was not much interested in studying the nature of Tibet; his attention was aimed at the thorough fixation of its ethical, cultural, social, and religious peculiarities. The book included a short self-biography of the author and 17 chapters, some of them – on the description of Lhasa, the institute of Dalai-lama (the author was granted an audience of Dalai-lama), the social and political system of Tibet, religious rites observed by him, visits to monasteries, and Buddhist literature. In the course of his travel, he acquired ‘with much financial expenses and efforts on their accounting, more than 300 thick volumes of various compositions’ by Buddhist authors, later given to the library of the Asian Museum of the Ac. of Sc. (now the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg). An important result of the travel was the fact, that Ts. became the first researcher who made photos of the contemporary Tibet: about 200 shots. He illustrated the book with photos, not only with maps and drawings. The was published ‘in extremely hard times’ for Russia; it seemed not a proper situation ‘to describe a pilgrimage to distant countries’, but it could serve ‘the best testimony, that Russia was alive and worked in the full conscious understanding of its spiritual force, having united and uniting dozens of peoples… Written by a Buryat, a graduate of a Russian university, edited by a Russian, and published by the Russian Geographical Society’, on the opinion of its publishers, it was ‘a bright manifestation of the cultural unity of the West and the East by Russia, on the base of common work’. The book was translated into a number of European languages.