Background
Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin was born on August 29, 1777, in Kazanskaya, Krasnodar, Russian Federation. He was born to a family of half-Russian half-Chuvash father - Y.D. Pichurinski and Russian mother.
Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin was born on August 29, 1777, in Kazanskaya, Krasnodar, Russian Federation. He was born to a family of half-Russian half-Chuvash father - Y.D. Pichurinski and Russian mother.
Nikita Yakovlevich studied in the Kazan seminary.
On completion of the Kazan seminary (1799) taught grammar in it, then rhetoric. In 1800 became a monk. Since 1802 Nikita Yakovlevich was an archimandrite, the prior of Monastery of Voznesensky near Irkutsk and the rector the Seminary there. In 1802 he was tonsured with the name Hyacinth and sent to promote Christianity in Beijing, where he spent the next 14 years.
Hyacinth was forthwith accused of lacking religious zeal, stripped of his abbot's rank and incarcerated in the Valaam Monastery. There he translated a number of ancient and medieval Chinese manuscripts, which had previously been unknown in Europe. In succeeding decades he published many volumes on Chinese and Mongolian history, geography, religion, statistics, and agriculture.
It was Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin who came up with the idea for the name East Turkestan to replace the term "Chinese Turkestan" in 1829. In 1835, he was awarded the Demidov Prize. In 1837 he opened the first Chinese-language school in the Russian Empire. For his sinological contributions, he was elected to the Russian, German, and French Academies of Sciences.
