August Hermann Francke

Who was August Hermann Francke?

August Hermann Francke was a German Tibetologist.

His grandfather was Christian Friedrich Francke, a descendant of the eighteenth-century theologian August Hermann Francke, after whom August was named. He married Anna Theodora Weize whom he met in Kleinwelka, Saxony. Before they married she went to Amritsar for a year to improve her English as a teacher. August Hermann joined her in India and married her there in 1897.

He was a Moravian Church missionary in the Himalayas serving in that capacity in Ladakh, a major region of Jammu and Kashmir Province from 1896 until 1909. His return to Europe was occasioned by his wife's illness. He was subsequently appointed professor of Tibetan languages at Berlin University.

After Yoseb Gergan produced the first draft of the Tibetan Bible in 1910, Francke corrected it and then sent it to David Macdonald, the British trade agent in Yatung. Also involved was his Moravian colleague Heinrich Jäschke who produced A Tibetan-English dictionary.

Francke became professor at Berlin and his students included Walter Simon.