VALUABLE GIFTS ARE RECEIVED BY FOGG

The Fogg Art Museum has recently received a group of four gifts from Baron Alexander von Stael-Holstein which form one of the most important acquisitions of the year, according to an announcement made last night. The donor is professor of Sanskrit in the National University of Peking and, at present, a visiting professor at Harvard.

Photographs of 800 inscribed Buddhist statuettes which had never been seen by any foreigner prior to June 1926 are the most important of the gifts. Each of these statuettes bears the Chinese name of the respective divinity, which was worshipped at the Imperial court of Peking about the year 1750.

Baron von Stael-Holstein was the first foreigner ever admitted to the carefully guarded precincts of the Imperial palace of Peking. The court in which the collection was housed was the home of certain Dowager Empresses and of those concubines who had lost the royal favor.

A complete photographed copy of a manuscript, dating from the eighteenth century and containing 360 Chinese eulogies, composed by a Lamaistic archbishop in honor of these Chinese divinities is the second of Baron von Stael-Holstein's gifts to the Museum.

By means of a third gift, a collection of 237 hand-drawn and colored images, red Lamaism, the ancient, unaltered form of Buddism, has for the first time been satisfactorily explained to the Western World. Red Lamaism, which was later followed by the reformed yellow Lamaism, was in its ascendency in the fourteenth century.

The fourth gift dating from the eighteenth century is a manuscript roll from Tun Huang, a province of Kansu, China, which bears a Chinese Buddhist text on the obverse and rough draughts of state documents in ancient Tibetan and in the Iranian language of Khotan on the reverse side.