Susan Whitfield, Aurel Stein on the Silk Road.

[robot_mel]

Susan Whitfield is one of my idols, she is in charge of the International Dunhuang Project, digitising the Dunhuang documents and making them freely available on the web. She works for the British Library and is speaking at the conference I want to go to in May. So it's not very surprising that I loved this book. It's almost a coffee table book, full of pictures from Stein's expeditions, but it also contains a very interesting biography of the man and his adventures. Despite having studied his trips to China before I found that I learned an awful lot from this book. I was expected to be less interested in his travels to other places but found that I was fascinated by it all. I also learned much more about his trips to China, including that he was fascinated by Xuanzang, (The monk whose own travels became legendary in Journey to the West). There were lots of extracts from the books that Stein wrote about his own travels and explorations which I now want to be able to track down and read. I also learned that the travel writings of the monks had also already been translated into English and I now need to find copies of those to read! I also feel like I owe an apology, in my research for my essay on the Dunhuang documents I did last year, every source I read made a point of saying how Pelliot was able to read Chinese and Stein couldn't so his documents ended up being a better collection. However, this paints a rather unfavourable picture of Stein, he never learned Classical Chinese, but he did learn to speak modern Chinese, and studied at least 7 other languages. A great book, gorgeous pictures and a fascinating account of a very interesting man.