Through the heart of Afghanistan / by Emil Trinkler ; edited and translated by B. K. Featherstone.

“With a map and forty-four illustrations form photographs by the author”—title page.

“Through the Heart of Afghanistan is an English translation of Emil Trinkler’s Quer durch Afghanistan nach Indien, published in Berlin in 1927. Trinkler (1896‒1931) was a German geographer and explorer who went to Afghanistan in 1923‒24 as a geologist for the German-Afghan Trading Company. The book is an account of Trinkler’s voyage, which began in Riga, Latvia, and included a trip by train across Russia followed by a seven-week delay at the Russian-Afghan border. Trinkler eventually succeeded in entering Afghanistan and traveled on to India. The book contains vivid accounts of the places he visited, including Herat, central Afghanistan, Kabul, Peshawar, and the “Valley of the Great Buddha,” where Trinkler viewed the large, rock Buddhist statues of Bamian (destroyed by the Afghan Taliban in 2001). The chapter on Kabul describes the opening up of the country brought about by the amir, Amanullah Khan (ruled 1919‒29), and the work of German architects and engineers in building roads, of the German medical mission in superintending the hospitals, and of “the celebrated German-Afghan Company [in] trying to reorganize the administration and business of Afghanistan.” The book includes 44 photographs by the author and a fold-out map of Afghanistan. Trinkler published the scientific results of his trip in a separate volume, Afghanistan: Eine landeskundliche Studie auf Grund des vorhandenen Materials und eigener Beobachtung (Gotha, 1928). In 1927‒28 Trinkler led a German scientific expedition to Tibet, which he documented in two books published in 1930. His career as an explorer and Asia expert was cut short the following year when he was killed in an automobile accident near his native Bremen”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

English