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Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road. By ANNABEL WALKER. London: John Murray; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. xiv, 393 pp. $19.95 (paper).
Annabel Walker's Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road is a journey back into the life and times of a turn-of-the-century scholar-explorer-adventurer. Walker captures the essence of Sir Aurel Stein's desires and efforts from a youth, reflecting on the history of Budapest to Stein's days as an educational administrator in Lahore, his abbreviated stay in Calcutta, and his journey over mountain passes into the lands of the ancient Silk Road(s). This book is a formidable achievement which introduces Stein in his family's adopted Magyar homeland and chronicles his life as he matured into a scholar-explorer, convinced of his righteousness of purpose, until his final moments and subsequent burial in the Christian cemetery of Kabul.
The reader is introduced to the controversy surrounding Stein as one of the foreign devils who plundered China from the perspective of some, while from other vantage points he was a savior of Central Asia's antiquity who transported the Silk Road heritage to secure quarters in Western universities and libraries. As Walker indicates, "Unlike the Elgin Marbles, the figurines, wall-paintings and wooden tablets from the Taklamakan Desert have mostly remained in the...