Kafarov, Petr

(monastic name, Palladii). Born Sept. 17 (29), 1817, in Chistopol’, present-day Tatar ASSR; died Dec. 6 (18), 1878, in Marseille. Russian sinologue. He studied at the Kazan Seminary and the St. Petersburg Religious Academy. In September 1840 he visited Peking as a member of a religious mission; he lived there intermittently for 38 years.

Kafarov had a wide range of scholarly interests. He compiled the large Chinese-Russian Dictionary (parts 1–2, 1888, finished by P. S. Popov). He translated the Chinese works Journey of the Taoist Monk Ch’ang Ch’un to the West, The Old Mongolian Legend of Genghis Kahn (1866), and The Old Chinese Legend of Genghis Khan (1877). A number of his works were devoted to the study of the history of religions in China (Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) and the history of Chinese relations with other peoples, particularly Russian-Chinese relations. He took part in the Russian Geographical Society’s 1870–71 archaeological and ethnographic expedition to Ussuri Krai.