As much as any other figure of his time, Petr Aleksandrovich Badmaev embodied the conflicting notes of ambition, ambivalence, optimism, and suspicion that marked Russia’s career as an imperial power in East Asia during the last decades of Romanov rule. Historians know him best as the author of an elaborate 1893 memorandum advocating Russia’s historic mission to extend the “white tsar’s” sway over eastern China and Tibet. Contemporary observers and posterity alike also regarded him as a symbol of the autocracy’s decadence or disarray during its final years under Nicholas II, one of those shadowy figures like his sometime associate