Dorzhiev was born in 1854 at Khara-Shibir in Transbaikalia, in a Buryat community that had been Buddhist for a century and a half and that belonged to the Russian empire. He went to Lhasa as a young man, entered Gomang college at Drepung, and took the lharampa degree, the highest in the Gelug curriculum, which almost no foreigner had done. He then became one of the assistants who debate with the Dalai Lama as part of his training, and he stayed close to the thirteenth Dalai Lama for the rest of that ruler's life.
Being a Russian subject at the centre of the Tibetan government at the end of the nineteenth century made him a political object whether he wanted to be one or not. He travelled repeatedly between Lhasa and St Petersburg, was received by Nicholas II, and argued in Tibet that Russia might be a counterweight to Britain and in Russia that Tibet was worth an interest. British intelligence read this as the advance of a Russian protectorate, and it was among the reasons given for the Younghusband expedition, which invaded Tibet in 1903 and 1904.
How much substance lay behind the alarm is still argued about. The Russian commitment was slighter than London believed, and Dorzhiev appears to have been doing more of the work of the relationship than either government was.