The first days of the conference were hosted by the Asiatic Society, where Kőrösi Csoma (1784-1842) was a guest between 1831 and 1842. It was here that he compiled the first Tibetan-English dictionary, for which he is best known.
The room where Kőrösi Csoma stayed has since been turned into a museum. For the occasion of the conference, the Asiatic Society put together a special exhibition of Kőrösi Csoma's manuscripts as well as books written about him.
At the weekend, the conference was hosted by the Department of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Santiniketan University, in West Bengal. The university was founded by the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore on his own land. During the 1920s, many Hungarian researchers and artists visited the West Bengali city, among them the orientalist Gyula Germanus and his wife Rózsa Hajnóczy, who wrote the book The Fire of Bengal.
The conference marks the start of a series of events that the Hungarian Institute has organised to celebrate the anniversary of Kőrösi Csoma's birth.
Source: Múlt-kor
