Ferdinand von Richthofen

Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833 to 1905) was a German geologist, geographer and traveller, known in English as Baron von Richthofen. Born in Prussian Silesia, he studied in Breslau and Berlin and made early surveys of the Alps of Tyrol and the Carpathians in Transylvania. He joined the Prussian Eulenburg Expedition to East Asia in 1860, then worked as a geologist in the United States from 1862 to 1868, where he found goldfields in California. Several journeys in China from 1868 to 1872 led to his three volume work China, published in Berlin between 1877 and 1885, which treated geology and economic resources together. He coined the term Silk Road in 1877 and helped establish geography as a university discipline, holding chairs at Bonn, Leipzig and Berlin and serving as president of the Berlin Geographical Society.