Eugen Pander und seine lamaistische Sammlung

The Pander Collection, one of a few early Western collections of Tibetan literature, is a collection of Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu and Chinese Buddhist texts acquired in by the Russian scholar Eugen Pander (1854-1894(?)) during his stay in Beijing in the 1880s, probably from the Yonghegong Monastery. Brought to Berlin in 1889, the collection entered the former Prussian State Library around 1906 and, it seems, remained unexplored, apart from a hand-written catalogue prepared in that library, probably by the librarian Wilhelm Grube on the basis of a preliminary catalogue (now probably lost) drawn up by Pander. Towards the end of the Second World War the collection was evacuated to Lower Silesia, and on Silesia being ceded to Poland after the war, it remained there until it was discovered by a group of researchers from the Jagiellonian University Library, who transported, among others, the Pander Collection to the main Library seat in Krakow.