Berthold Laufer (1874 - 1934) was a celebrated sinologist, anthropologist and orientalist. From 1893 - 1895 he studied in Berlin and had courses in Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan. Laufer finished his studies at the University of Leipzig in 1897 - his doctoral dissertation was a critical analysis of a Tibetan text. In 1898 he emigrated to the United States where he worked as curator in Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History and became lecturer in Anthropology and East-Asiatic Languages at Columbia University. Laufer made four major expeditions to the Himalayas.