was to evaluate the spread of Buddhism among local tribes, to outline the course of action to contain it, and to compile a binding statute that would regulate all aspects of Buddhist religious practice. The imperial government did not tolerate any independent ideologies and settled on subjugating the Buddhist leaders to the state. Meanwhile, the number of Buddhist monks was increasing at pace, almost doubling over a decade. Outright repressions were ruled out, for fears of mass emigration of nomads, and of potential conflict with China. The government was also concerned with the decline of border trade at the Kyakhta checkpoint and the increase in smuggling; Schilling was tasked with identifying the routes and the markets used by smugglers and to evaluate the volume of illegal trade. Officially, the mission was limited to "studies of population and international trade on the Russo-Chinese frontier"; any research apart from these tasks had to be paid by Schilling personally. To raise money, Schilling sold his scientific library to the Ministry of Education. In May 1830 Schilling began the journey from Saint Petersburg to Kyakhta, a frontier market town that became his base for the next 18 months. His travels out of Kyakhta to various Buddhist shrines and border stations amounted, in total, to 7208 versts (7690 kilometers). Schilling himself wrote that the purpose of these travels was primarily ethnographic research. According to Bichurin, Schilling spent most of his time with Tibetan and Mongolian lamas, studying ancient Buddhist scriptures; he was concerned more with linguistics and history of Far Eastern peoples, rather than ethnography. His main quest was the search for the Kangyur - a Tibetan religious text closely guarded by the lamas and known to Europeans only in fragments. At the beginning, Schilling tried to obtain the complete Kangyur from China. He could not imagine that poor nomadic Buryats and Mongols could create, own and safeguard whole libraries of sacred literature. However, he soon found out that the Buryats of the Russian Empire owned three copies of three different editions of the Kangyur; one of the three was preserved in Chikoy, less than twenty miles east from Kyakhta. Schilling earned the respect of the lamas for being the only Russian who could read Tibetan texts, and easily obtained permission to read and copy them. According to Leonid Chuguevsky, it is likely that the lamas were aware of Schilling's mission and his liberal view