This is a stucco relief head of a warrior. The face has a fierce expression and is well rendered. The eyebrows are highly arched, making a ridge across the root of the nose. The eyes are prominent with heavily marked lids and bulging eyeballs. The nose is slightly aquiline with sharply cut nostrils. The full, curved mouth is small, with a prominent hanging lower lip. The chin is cleft. The face is rather long and oval. On the head is a close-fitting helmet. Only the face is preserved with some residues of colour. The body is lost. 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.