Alexander von Staël-Holstein

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Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein (1877 - 1937) was a Russian orientalist, specializing in Buddhist texts.

Related to Madame de Staël's husband, the future baron was born in an aristocratic family in Estonia, then belonging to the Russian Empire, on the New Year's Day. He was educated at home during his childhood. When he reached 15, he was sent to a Gymnasium in the town of Pärnu. He pursued his higher education at the Dorpat University, where some of his families had studied, majoring in comparative philology. After his graduation, he left for Germany, studying oriental languages in the Berlin University.

In his second year in Berlin, as the only male heir he inherited the family estate and the baronage. In 1900, he gained his doctorate with his dissertation Der Karmapradīpa, II. Prapāthaka from the University of Halle-Wittenberg. During the following years, he traveled widely and studied with the best oriental scholars in Germany, England and India.

He started his academic career in 1909 when he was appointed assistant professor of Sanskrit in the University of St. Petersburg and the member of the Academic Committee for the Exploration of Central Asia and the Far East (ACECAFE). In 1912, he visited the US and lived in Harvard for some time to study Sanskrit.

He was in China when the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia broke out. The government of the new Estonian Republic, established in 1918 after the Versailles treaty, left him only a small part of his inherited estate. He then accepted an Estonian citizenship but remained in Beijing. With the recommendation of his friend Charles Eliot, the then principal of the University of Hong Kong, he was invited by Hu Shi to teach Sanskrit, Tibetan and History of Indian Religion in the Beijing University, as lecturer from 1918 to 1921 and as professor from 1922 to 1929. He helped set up the Sino-Indian Institute in Beijing in 1927. In 1928 he was a visiting scholar in Harvard, helping the Harvard-Yenching Institute to collect books. In 1932, he was selected an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of History and Philology (歷史語言研究所), Academia Sinica.

Besides his works on Indian and Tibetan religions, he also contributed to the field of historical Chinese phonology. His influential "The Phonetic Transcription of Sanskrit Works and Ancient Chinese Pronunciation" was translated by Hu Shi into Chinese and was published in Guoxue Jikan (國學季刊) in 1923.

[edit] Selected works

The Kāçyapaparivarta: a Mahāyānasūtra of the Ratnakūṭa class, edited in the original Sanskrit, in Tibetan and in Chinese, Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1926
On a Tibetan text translated into Sanskrit under Ch'ien Lung (XIII cent.) and into Chinese under Tao Kuang (XIX cent.), Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping, 1932
On two Tibetan pictures representing some of the spiritual ancestors of the Dalai Lama and of the Panchen Lama, Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping, 1932
A commentary to the Kāçcyapaparivarta, edited in Tibetan and in Chinese, Peking: published jointly by the National Library and the National Tsinghau University, 1933
On a Peking edition of the Tibetan kanjur which seems to be unknown in the West, Peking: Lazarist Press, 1934
On two recent reconstructions of a Sanskrit hymn transliterated with Chinese characters in the X century A.D, Peking: Lazarist Press, 1934
Two Lamaistic pantheons, edited with introduction and indexes by Walter Eugene Clark from materials collected by the late Baron A. von Staël-Holstein, Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series 3 and 4, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937