towards state control over religion, and in their own way tried to appease the friendly but dangerous visitor. The Chikoy Kangyur could only be copied, but Schilling managed to acquire parts of a different copy from the chief of the Tsongol tribe. Later the Khambo Lama of the Buryats sent Schilling a collection of medical and astrological treatises. Schilling became a celebrity among the Buryats: some lamas preached that he was the prophet that would convert the Europeans, others believed that he was the reincarnated Khubilgan. His house in Kyakhta became the object of mass pilgrimage that brought more and more manuscripts. Schilling realised that, apart from the complete Kangyur, his collection missed only a few essential texts of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. He filled the gaps by hiring more than twenty calligraphists who copied the missing books. Józef Kowalewski, who witnessed the process, wrote that "the Baron", although an amateur, "influenced the Buriats immensely ... There appeared experts in the Tibetan and even in Sanskrit languages, painters, engravers; the monks began to inquire more deeply into the foundations of their faith and to read books; there were discovered many books which had been before claimed as being non-extant". Finally, in March 1831 Schilling obtained the Kangyur and the 224-volume Tengyur at a remote datsan on the Onon River. Local lamas struggled to print 100 million copies of Om mani padme hum that they once vowed to contribute to a new shrine, and Schilling came to the rescue promising to print the whole lot, in tiny lithographed Tibetan script, in Saint Petersburg. He fulfilled the promise, and was rewarded with the precious books. This Derge edition of the Kangyur, which Schilling mistook for the older, classic Narthang version, was the first Kangyur owned by a European. Once the collection was complete, Schilling began cataloguing and indexing; his Index of the Narthang Kangyur, printed posthumously and anonymously in 1845, contains 3800 pages in four volumes. Schilling returned to Moscow in March 1832, and one month later arrived in Saint Petersburg with reports and drafts of statutes on cross-border trade and on Buddhist clergy. He recommended keeping the status quo on both issues, while keeping an eye on similar problems of the British administrators in Canton. The government decided not to press the issue of religion; a statute regulating the Buddhists was enacted only in 1853. Having fulfilled the mission, Schilling concentrated