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thumb Baron Alexander Staël von Holstein (, January 1, 1877, in Testama manor, then Governorate of Estonia (Russian Empire)March 16, 1937, in Peiping, Republic of China); was a German-baltic aristocrat, Russian and Estonian orientalist, sinologist, sanskritologist, specializing in Buddhist texts. == Life == Related to Madame de Staël's husband, the future baron was born in the province of Estland (Estonia), then belonging to the Russian Empire,in an aristocratic family (with widespread relations in other German Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire, Sweden and Northern Germany) 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 Pernau (now Pärnu). He pursued his higher education at the Dorpat University (Tartu), 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. Prussian public records of 1898 show that the young Baron was involved in a duel in Berlin, which he apparently survived. In his second year in Berlin, as the only male heir he inherited the family estate in Testama (now Tõstamaa)〔The manor is a school now and still very well preserved〕 and the baronage. In 1900, he gained his doctorate with his dissertation ''Der Karmapradīpa, II. Prapāthaka'' from the University of Halle-Wittenberg. The first Prapāthaka of the Karmapradīpa had been translated in 1889 by Friedrich Schrader, also as a dissertation in Halle. The supervisor of both dissertations was Professor Richard Pischel, at that time the world's leading expert on Prakrit, the ancient form of Sanskrit, and long-time head of the "Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft", the German Orientalist Society. During the following years, Baron de Stael 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 Russian Committee for the Exploration of Central and Eastern Asia. 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 Peking 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Alexander von Staël-Holstein」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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