Historians of the modern Far East have usually assumed that in spite of the founding of the Tsungli-yamen and the launching of the self-strengthening movement of the 1860's, Chinese foreign policy remained weak, inept, and uninformed. Typically, China's handling of the Korean problem is contrasted with the swift and sure diplomacy of the new Japan to show how little Chinese statesmen understood of changing world conditions or of the altered character of the threat from Japan. China's failure to prevent Korea from slipping out of the tributary system is held to offer such obvious proof of the inadaptability of Ch'ing diplomacy as to make the issue scarcely worth discussing.

The data of village and farm business surveys in India are too inaccurate to be of use in the analysis of the rural economy or the changes therein. This unsatisfactory nature of the data stems from the difference in outlook and interests of the cultivator and the investigator, the problem of memory, the problem of indifference in a context of hierarchical loyalties and conflicts, and the problem of motivation toward accurate replies on the part of the respondent when he has many reasons to mislead in many directions and few, if any, reasons to be conscientiously helpful. Some data, those which can be gathered by counting or by limited observation, are usable, but the gathering of quantitative data on farm operations will require a great effort over an extended period of time on a village at a time. Otherwise, the foreign scholar or visiting expert must restrict himself to employing the small amount of the bench-mark data as a base from which to work in constructing a description of the structure of aspects of the rural economy without hope of being able to employ quantitative methods on any but the most limited scale.

There are several reasons why the legal institution of dien . (generally, but, as will be shown, erroneously rendered in English as “mortgage”) should be of interest to the student of Chinese and Vietnamese law. First of all, it merits attention on account of its very wide use, a fact which has been recognized by its incorporation, in a modified form, into the Chinese Civil Code. Then again it affords a striking example of an attempt by the Chinese government in Imperial times to develop by legislation the scope and purpose of an institution of private customary law, and of the way in which customary law asserted its vitality in face of the legislator by surviving unchanged into modern times. And lastly it illustrates, by the erroneous interpretations that for 150 years have been put upon it by European lawyers, the pitfalls that lie in the way of anyone who tries to explain Far Eastern legal concepts in European terms.

Yüan opera, if we limit our material to the one hundred examples found in the Yüan-ch'ü hsüan (YCH), seems to be a well defined genre, the numerous formal peculiarities of which can be shown to have evolved from earlier entertainment forms in a manner truly comforting to the literary historian. Analyzed, Yiian drama shows a highly consistent structure with the following features:

1. Four “acts” with the option of a demi-act, “wedge,” which can appear between any two acts, or at the beginning of the tsa-chü (Yüan opera).

2. Within each act all arias were sung to tunes of the same mode.