He was born in 1822 in Transbaikalia into a Buryat Cossack family and was sent to the Russo-Mongol school at Troitskosavsk on the Chinese frontier, then to the gymnasium at Kazan and to Kazan University, where he read oriental languages. He was the first Buryat to take a Russian university degree, and by the time he finished he worked in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic and Sanskrit as well as several European languages.
His teachers expected him to continue in the university. He was not appointed. The obstacles were his estate, since he was formally a Cossack and owed service, and his religion, since chairs in the imperial system were effectively closed to a man who was not Orthodox and who declined to convert. After a period in St Petersburg he was posted to Irkutsk as an official for the affairs of the peoples of eastern Siberia under the governor general.
He kept working in the margins of the job, publishing on Mongolian inscriptions, on the figure of the White Old Man, and on an inscribed stone of the Chinggisid period. He died at Irkutsk in 1855, aged thirty-three, and the circumstances are recorded only sparsely. He is now a figure of national importance in Buryatia, with the state university at Ulan-Ude named after him, which settles a debt the empire declined to pay in his lifetime.