The photographs from Stein's fourth expedition: a footnote

WHEN Wang Jiqing prepared his report on the photographs of the missing artefacts from Sir Aurel Stein's Fourth Central Asian Expedition, it was generally believed that the original negatives, from which the 'improved' versions were made at the Thomason College at Roorkee, had been lost. By coincidence, the recent detailed listing of the Stein Photograph Collection, held in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs Section of the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections, has revealed that these negatives had not disappeared or been destroyed but, in keeping with Stein's meticulous arrangement of his collections, had been preserved along with his other photographs. They appear to have been overlooked in previous listings of the collection owing to the lack of any detailed description of the material in Stein's own negative index books.