HI-TECH: Surveying instruments used to create a topographical map of the regions traveled during Clark's expedition (MAGGIE RAUCH)

Once posted, the book and the images quickly caught the attention of three people who were so captivated by the material that they each ended up dedicating months to giving it new life. Shi Hongshi, a professor in Xi'an, translated the work, and his translation led to a four-part CCTV series on the expedition. Li set out to photograph the current scenes at each of the sites photographed by the Clark expedition. And a chemistry student at Oxford University, Ginny Howell, recruited two friends and set out to retrace Clark's steps in the summer of 2008, 100 years after the original expedition.

Together with classmates Victoria Thwaites and Luca Del Panta, with support from the Clark and the Oxford University Exploration Club, Howell traveled from Taiyuan to Lanzhou of Gansu Province (where the Clark expedition ended), then down to Chengdu, in the summer of 2008. The group photographed their journey and wrote about the changes they observed on a blog. It was the first trip to China for both Thwaites and Howell, and the trip not only produced a new basis for comparison between the Shen-Kan of Clark's time with that of modern-day China—it also impacted the remainder of the students' time at Oxford. Howell became a chairperson of the Exploration Club until she graduated, and Thwaites, who had to do medical training for her role as the trip's medical officer, is now pursuing a graduate degree in medicine, a choice she traces to that summer in China.

While the Oxford students' interest lie in retracing Clark's trail and seeing China for the first time through the prism of a century-old expedition, Li brought a different perspective to Clark's legacy. He set out to photograph each of the scenes found in the book, for a side-by-side display with Clark's photos. The results, showcased in an installation called Then & Now at the Institute's Hunter Studio at Stone Hill, offer a peek into the ways that China has changed, and the ways it has stayed the same over the past 100 years.

Li's photos, Shi's translation, the Oxford students' summer trip, and the antiquities in Unearthed all give new life, a century later, to Clark's expedition, and have opened up new cultural and academic links between Taiyuan, Xi'an, Beijing and a tiny college town in the Berkshire hills.

The author is a freelance writer living in New York City

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