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"The Name of Sir Aurel Stein is linked forever with the Silk Road of Central Asia - one of the great romantic and evocative images of the East. For thirty years, in the face of fierce rivalry, this brilliant archaeologist led the race to uncover a long-lost Buddhist civilization which had lain for a thousand years beneath China's deserts. Today the treasures which he and his competitors - from Germany, France, Japan, Sweden and America - removed from the sand-covered tombs and temples of the ancient Silk Road are scattered among the museums of a dozen countries." "In all Stein marched some 25,000 miles across Central Asia, often in appalling conditions, accompanied always by a small fox-terrier. Festooned with international honours, including a British knighthood, the Jewish Hungarian-born orientalist today lies in the lonely Christian cemetery at Kabul, where he died in 1943, aged 80, on the eve of one last great journey into the past." "The Central Asia historian Owen Lattimore described Stein as 'the most prodigious combination of scholar, explorer, archaeologist and geographer' of his era. But to the Chinese he was an imperialist villain who systematically robbed them of their history - the Lord Elgin of Central Asia."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved