Related to Madame de Staël's husband, the future baron was born in the Governorate of Livonia of the Russian Empire,in an aristocratic family on New Year's Day. He was educated at home during his childhood. When he reached 15, he was sent to a Gymnasium in the town of Pernau. He pursued his higher education at the Dorpat University, where some of his families had studied, majoring in comparative philology. After his graduation, he left for Germany, studying oriental languages in the Berlin University. Prussian public records of 1898 show that the young Baron was involved in a duel in Berlin, which he apparently survived. In his second year in Berlin, as the only male heir he inherited the family estate in Testama and the baronage. In 1900, he gained his doctorate with his dissertation Der Karmapradīpa, II. Prapāthaka from the University of Halle-Wittenberg. The first Prapāthaka of the Karmapradīpa had been translated in 1889 by Friedrich Schrader, also as a dissertation in Halle. The supervisor of both dissertations was Professor Richard Pischel, at that time the world's leading expert on Prakrit, the ancient form of Sanskrit, and long-time head of the "Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft", the German Orientalist Society. During the following years, Baron de Stael traveled widely and studied with the best oriental scholars in Germany, England and India. He started his academic career in 1909 when he was appointed assistant professor of Sanskrit in the University of St. Petersburg and the member of the Russian Committee for the Exploration of Central and Eastern Asia. In 1912, he visited the US and lived in Harvard for some time to study Sanskrit. He was in China when the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia broke out. The government of the new Estonian Republic, established in 1918 after the Versailles treaty, left him only a small part of his inherited estate. He then accepted an Estonian citizenship but remained in Beijing. With the recommendation of his friend Charles Eliot, the then principal of the University of Hong Kong, he was invited by Hu Shih to teach Sanskrit, Tibetan and History of Indian Religion in the Peking University, as lecturer from 1918 to 1921 and as professor from 1922 to 1929. He helped set up the Sino-Indian Institute in Beijing in 1927. In 1928 he was a visiting scholar in Harvard, helping the Harvard-Yenching Institute to collect books. In 1932, he was selected an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. Besides his works on Indian and Tibetan religions, he also contributed to the field of historical Chinese phonology. His influential "The Phonetic Transcription of Sanskrit Works and Ancient Chinese Pronunciation" was translated by Hu Shih into Chinese and was published in Guoxue Jikan in 1923.
Selected works
The Kāçyapaparivarta: a Mahāyānasūtra of the Ratnakūṭa class, edited in the original Sanskrit, in Tibetan and in Chinese, Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1926
On two Tibetan pictures representing some of the spiritual ancestors of the Dalai Lama and of the Panchen Lama, Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping, 1932
A commentary to the Kāçcyapaparivarta, edited in Tibetan and in Chinese, Peking: published jointly by the National Library and the National Tsinghau University, 1933
On a Peking edition of the Tibetan kanjur which seems to be unknown in the West, Peking: Lazarist Press, 1934
On two recent reconstructions of a Sanskrit hymn transliterated with Chinese characters in the X century A.D, Peking: Lazarist Press, 1934
Two Lamaistic pantheons, edited with introduction and indexes by Walter Eugene Clark from materials collected by the late Baron A. von Staël-Holstein, Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series 3 and 4, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937
