Ksenia Kepping

Her father, Boris Mikhailovich von Kepping (1896–1958), had been an officer in the White Army who lived in Harbin in north-east China after the Russian Civil War (1917–1923).

He subsequently married Olga Viktorovna Svyatina (1900–1992), and moved to Tianjin where her brother, the future Metropolitan Viktor (Leonid Viktorovich Svyatin, 1893–1966), was a priest (he was later appointed Bishop of Beijing and head of the Russian Spiritual Mission in China).

During 1989–1990 she spent a year at the Minzu University of China in Beijing, where she worked with Chinese Tangutologists, including as Shi Jinbo, Bai Bin and Li Fanwen.

[2] She also made several visits to the British Library in London to study the Tangut fragments from Khara-Khoto brought back by Aurel Stein.

[4] In 1986 Japanese Tangutologist Nishida Tatsuo had noted that certain ritual Tangut odes are written using two different sets of vocabularies, which he suggested reflected the languages of two ethnic groups, a sedentary, agriculturalist population known as the "red-faced people", and a nomadic elite, known as the "black-headed people", who he thought were the ruling class of Tangut society.