[1] Georges Perrot, a French archaeologist and newly appointed director of the École Normale Supérieure, advised Chavannes to begin studying China after he finished his schooling.

[1][2] Desiring to advance his studies with actual experience in China, Chavannes used the connections of certain friends of his to obtain a position as an attaché to a scientific mission associated with the French Legation in Peking (modern Beijing).

[3] As a sinologist, Chavannes took the Chinese name Sha Wan (沙畹) and the courtesy name Zilan (滋蘭), and he also had an art name Shicheng Boshi (獅城博士, "The Doctor of Lyon").

Chavannes' first scholarly publication, "Le Traité sur les sacrifices Fong et Chan de Se-ma Ts'ien, traduit en français" ("Sima Qian's Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices, Translated into French"), which was published in 1890 while he was in Beijing, inspired him to begin a translation of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the first of China's dynastic histories.

[9] The first volume of the translation was published in Paris in 1895, and begins with a 249-page introduction which the German anthropologist Berthold Laufer described as "a masterpiece of historical and critical analysis... not surpassed by anything of this character written before or after him.

[9] Chavannes was major pioneer in the field of modern epigraphy, and was praised by Berthold Laufer as "the first European scholar who approached this difficult subject with sound and critical methods and undisputed success.

[12] Chavannes' style in Le T'ai Chan, with his annotated translations, extensive commentary, and exhaustively researched sources was inspirational and influential to later French sinologists.

The book, published in Paris as Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine (A Manichaean Treatise Found in China), was praised by Berthold Laufer upon Chavannes' death in 1918 as "perhaps the most brilliant achievement in modern sinology.