Aurel Stein

Origins and early life

Aurel Stein was born on 26 November 1862 in Budapest, into a family Jewish on both sides — the Encyclopaedia Judaica's own words — whose parents had him baptized a Lutheran as a child, a choice this fiche states plainly; he figures in this directory by that documented Jewish birth and parentage.

Work and career

Trained in Sanskrit and Persian at Vienna, Leipzig and Tübingen, he went to India in 1887 and from there, between 1900 and 1930, led four great expeditions into the deserts of Chinese Central Asia that made him the foremost explorer-archaeologist of the Silk Road. His hour came in 1907 at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang: from the sealed library cave he carried away thousands of manuscripts of the fourth to tenth centuries — among them the Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest dated printed book in the world — a haul that filled the British Museum and remains, in China, a wound.

He mapped the ruins of Khotan and the Great Wall's western limits, crossed the Taklamakan on foot, and lost the toes of one foot to frostbite in the Kunlun.

Later years

Knighted in 1912, he never married and never stopped; he died in Kabul on 26 October 1943, at eighty, days after arriving for the Afghan expedition he had waited a lifetime to make.