[2] His rapid progress and accomplishments attracted the attention of the Sinologist Édouard Chavannes, the chair of Chinese at the Collège de France, who befriended Pelliot and began mentoring him.

[2] In early 1900, Pelliot moved to Hanoi to take up a position as a research scholar at the École Française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO, "French School of the Far East").

[2] At one point, during a ceasefire, Pelliot made a daring one-man foray to the rebels' headquarters, where he used his boldness and fluency in Mandarin to impress the besiegers into giving him fresh fruit for those inside the legation.

Aboard the train in Samarkand, the Frenchmen met Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, a colonel in the Russian Imperial Army and the last Tsarist agent in the Great Game.

Mannerheim was actually carrying out a secret mission for Tsar Nicholas II to collect intelligence on the reform and modernization of the Qing Dynasty.

In return, the Frenchman demanded free passage on the Trans-Caspian Railway, a personal and confidential payment of ten thousand francs and a Cossack escort.

[6] The expedition traveled to Chinese Turkestan by rail through Moscow and Tashkent to Andijan, where they mounted horses and carts to Osh.

Recognizing its antiquity and archaeological value, Pelliot quickly set off for Dunhuang, but arrived there months after the Hungarian-British explorer Aurel Stein had already visited the site.

[11] At Dunhuang, Pelliot managed to gain access to Abbot Wang's secret chamber, which contained a massive hoard of medieval manuscripts.

Pelliot, on the other hand, had an extensive command of Classical Chinese and numerous other Central Asian languages, and spent three weeks during April 1908 examining manuscripts at breakneck speed.

While at Dunhuang, Pelliot had written a detailed account of some of the most valuable documents he had found and mailed it back to Europe, where it was published upon its arrival.

[4] That intellectual feat was so astonishing that many who were unfamiliar with Pelliot and his prodigious memory believed he had faked all the manuscripts and written his report from a library full of reference books.

The campaign came to a head with a December 1910 article in La Revue Indigène by Fernand Farjenel (d. 1918) of the Collège libre des sciences sociales.