AUREL STEIN: PIONEER OF THE SILK ROAD IN THANE

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.