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His Excellency, The Most Reverend

Félix-Marie Biet

MEP
His Excellency, The Most Reverend; Félix-Marie Biet; MEP
Church	Catholic Church
Diocese	Apostolic Vicariate of Tibet
Installed	27 August 1878
Term ended	9 September 1901
Predecessor	Joseph-Marie Chauveau [zh]
Successor	Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau [fr]
Other post(s)	Titular Bishop of Diana
Orders
Consecration	by Annet-Théophile Pinchon [fr]
Personal details
Born	21 October 1838; Langres, Haute-Marne, France
Died	9 September 1901 (aged 62); Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d'Or, Lyon Metropolis, France
Occupation	Priest, missionary, entomologist, ornithologist
Motto	Suaviter et fortiter
Coat of arms

Félix Biet, MEP (1838 in Langres, Haute-Marne – 1901 in Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d'Or) was a French Catholic prelate who served as the Apostolic Vicar of Tibet from 1878 to 1901. He was a member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and also a naturalist.

Life

Biet was born in 1838. He was ordained as a priest in 1864. He was next sent to Tatsienlu in Tibet (called Dartsedo by Tibetans) as a missionary and he became the Bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Thibet, now Diocese of Kangding, in 1898. Félix Biet collected butterflies for Charles Oberthür who dedicated three new species (Thecla bieti, Pantoporia bieti and Anthocharis bieti) to him. Alphonse Milne-Edwards described the Chinese mountain cat (Felis bieti) and the black snub-nosed monkey, (Rhinopithecus bieti), the latter collected and sent by Jean-André Soulié. The Biet's laughingthrush a Chinese endemic species was another discovery, named by Émile Oustalet in 1897. Those natural history collections from Tibet and China are in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

He was succeeded by Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau.

Adrien Launay (1916), Mémorial de la Société des missions étrangères
Françoise Fauconnet-Buzelin (2012), Les Martyrs oubliés du Tibet. Chronique d'une rencontre manquée (1855-1940), éd. du Cerf, coll. Petit Cerf, Paris, 2012, 656 pages