This wooden fragment of a painted panel depicts a Buddha head looking to its right. The colours are well-preserved. The skin is yellow; the eyebrows, upper eyelids and the hair are black; the outlines of the face and halo are red; the background is crimson. This object was excavated from a ruined Buddhist shrine at the site of Khadalik, which lies between Khotan and Keriya on the southern branch of the Silk Road in Xinjiang, China.

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.