Eric Douglas Grinstead (30 July 1921 – November 2008) was a New Zealand sinologist and Tangutologist, who was best known for his analysis of the Tangut script. Biography Grinstead was born in Wanganui, New Zealand, on 30 July 1921. He studied at Wanganui Technical College and then at Victoria University College in Wellington where in 1942 he obtained a master's degree. He then went to England to do post-graduate study for a bachelor's degree at the University of London. After graduating he worked as assistant keeper in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts at the British Museum. During the late 1960s and 1970s he worked at the Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He died at Copenhagen in November 2008. Contributions to Tangut studies Grinstead became interested in the Tangut script whilst working at the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts at the British Museum (later part of the British Library). Although the British Museum did not possess many complete or nearly complete Tangut texts, it did hold about 6,000 fragments of printed and manuscript texts written in the Tangut script, mostly of a Buddhist nature, that had been collected by Aurel Stein from the Tangut fortress city of Khara-Khoto from 1913 to 1916. These fragments had been largely ignored by Tangutologists, but during the 1960s Grinstead published several brief articles about them in the British Museum Quarterly. One of his articles, in 1963, identified the first non-Buddhist Tangut manuscript from Stein's collection, a unique manuscript copy of a Tangut translation/adaptation of a Chinese work on military strategy ascribed to Zhuge Liang entitled The General's Garden. In 1964, Grinstead made a visit to the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, which held the Kozlov collection of Tangut documents from Khara-Khoto, and spent a month there studying Tangut texts with Yevgeny Kychanov and A. P. Terentev-Katansky. In the late 1960s Lokesh Chandra invited Grinstead to catalogue a large collection of about 15,000 photographs and photocopies of Tangut Buddhist texts that had been acquired by his father, the famous Sanskrit scholar Raghu Vira (died 1963), during visits to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China during the 1950s. These comprised the majority of the Tangut Buddhist manuscript and printed texts held at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Library of China, and at that time