In the second half of the 19th century, interest in Hungarian history and the history of the Hungarian notion of China converged at several points. History, linguistics, ethnography and art history all encompassed the Hungarian myth of Oriental descent. The first scientific expedition to China (1877-1880) was led by Count Béla Széchenyi. It aimed to find ancestors of the Hungarians that had remained in Asia. The expedition brought positive results not in this regard, but in the fields of natural sciences, geography and geology. Due to the excellent scientific background of its members as well as to modern surveying instruments, the expedition made important scientific observations and collected a large amount of data, thus greatly contributing to the knowledge on China. Count Jenő Zichy launched three self-funded Asian expeditions aiming at unfolding the legends of the family’s origins. The first one was in 1895 to the Caucasus, and the second in 1896 to Turkestan. In the third expeditoin (1897-1898) Zichy arrived at Beijing via Urga and the Gobi Desert. The participants of the expedition spent three weeks in Shanghai, and then traveled on to Hong Kong before returning home via Singapore, Colombo, Aden, Alexandria and Brindisi. Count Zichy paid special attention to the archaeological material, from where he supposed to locate the original homeland of the Hungarians. The major objective of his expeditions was to collect evidentiary material and to examine documents from the age of Hungary’s first rulers, the House of Árpád (897-1301) that were taken from Hungary by Batu Khan in 1241.