Rubbing of "Prajnaparamitahridaya" (The Heart of the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom)

Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein (1877-1937) was an early Western scholar of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese languages, who contributed to the translation of several important Buddhist texts. In the 1920s and 30s, he was a professor of Sanskrit, Tibetan and History of Indian Religions at Peking University in Beijing, and in 1928 was a visiting professor at Harvard, helping the Harvard-Yenching Institute to collect important books. A selection of the illustrated literature von Staël-Holstein brought with him from Beijing to Harvard were compiled by Walter Eugene Clark to form the seminal 1937 Two Lamaistic Pantheons, one of the earliest Western references of Qing-dynasty Buddhist iconography.