Matt King, a scholar of Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism, asked me one day if I could help him to figure out the identity of a mysterious man from “Eng-a-leng” who appears in an account of an 1889 meeting between a Tibetan Lama and a Christian missionary as transcribed by a Mongolian monk in the early twentieth century. The results of our detective work can be found here, in History and Anthropology.
King, Matt, and Pamela Klassen. “Suppressing the Mad Elephant: Missionaries, Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands.” History and Anthropology 26, no. 5 (2015): 529–52.