SUMMARY:

In 1899, a museum shaped like a Buryat Buddhist temple was built in Chita to house the Geographic Society’s Buddhist collections. Arsonists destroyed the museum-temple in 1914, a crime explained as a righteous reaction to the Buryats’ unlawful use of the museum-temple for prayer. Diverse elites – progressive press, political exiles, Buddhist lamas, and imperial administrators – were invested in the museum for modernizing expertise about Buryat life. Yet perceptions of it differed: temple of science or prayer; cultural treasure or threat. Analyzing the ambiguity of secular and sacred in light of the political stakes of this distinction textures our understanding of imperial orders.