This is a stucco relief of a Bodhisattva figurine. The face is full and round, with fat creased cheeks and a small chin. The bowed lips are small and full. The small nostrils are sharply cut. The corners of the mouth are deeply dimpled. The nose forms a straight line with the forehead and is narrow-bridged and sharp. The arched eyebrows are long and narrow. The prominent eyes have broad lids which are almost closed. The hair is parted from the centre and loosely drawn back under a fillet, making crescent shaped curves towards the ears. The fillet consists of a band of square beads between plain borders. Everything above the fillet is lost, as is the right ear and the rest of the body but the head. The left ear is damaged. It was excavated at the major Buddhist (cave) temple site at Ming-oi which literally means “the Thousand Dwellings”, a term not solely confined to this specific site, but also to other temple sites. It is located close to Karashahr on the northern branch of the Silk Road in Xinjiang, China. In the almost one-hundred Buddhist shrines at the site, many pieces of delicately carved heads, torsos and busts were brought to light.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has more than 70 ceramic fragments and fragments of Buddhist sculptures, as well as around 600 ancient and medieval textiles recovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) during his second expedition (1906-8) into Chinese Central Asia, where he once again visited and excavated sites on the southern Silk Road, before moving eastwards to Dunhuang. At Dunhuang, he studied and excavated the Han-dynasty watchtowers to the north of the town, as well as the Mogao cave temples to the southeast, where he acquired material from the Library Cave. From there he moved on to the northern Silk Road, stopping briefly at Turfan sites but not carrying out any excavations. He made a perilous north-south crossing of the Taklamakan desert in order to hasten to Khotan where he excavated more ancient sites, before finishing off his expedition with surveying in the Kunlun Mountains.