There are sporadic reports of Przewalski's horse in the historical record prior to its formal characterization. The Buddhist monk Bodowa wrote a description of what is thought to have been Przewalski's horse about AD 900, and an account from 1226 reports an incident involving wild horses during Genghis Khan's campaign against the Tangut empire. In the fifteenth century, Johann Schiltberger recorded one of the first European sightings of the horses in the journal recounting his trip to Mongolia as a prisoner of the Mongol Khan. Another was recorded as a gift to the Manchurian emperor about 1630, its value as a gift suggesting a difficulty in obtaining them. John Bell, a Scottish doctor in service to Peter the Great from 1719 to 1722, observed a horse in Russia's Tomsk Oblast that was apparently this species, and a few decades later in 1750, a large hunt with thousands of beaters organized by the Manchurian emperor killed between two and three hundred of these horses.