Talk by Professor Daniel Purdy about his recent paper. This paper explores the sudden emergence of a geographical link between East Prussia and Central Asia during the Seven Years’ War and its influence on Enlightenment ideas of bodily and cultural difference. Examining how German thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and August Ludwig Schlözer described the Kalmyks—a Mongolic, nomadic Buddhist people settled in the lower Volga under Russian rule—reveals how Russian-mediated encounters between Asians and Europeans fueled racial thinking and cultural stereotypes. While André Gingrich’s concept of “frontier Orientalism” frames contested Christian-Muslim borders in southeastern Europe, it assumes clearly defined boundaries. In East Prussia, however, the frontier appeared during the war, when Russian forces arrived with a vanguard of Cossacks and Kalmyks. Through this conflict, Central Asia entered Enlightenment anthropology not as a distant abstraction but as a direct and unsettling presence.