The William Elliot Griffis Collection in the Rutgers University Library, New Brunswick, New Jersey, embraces material on Japan, Korea, and China. It is contained in twenty-nine legal-size manuscript file cases: twenty relate to Japan; four to Korea; three to China; and one contains miscellaneous data. The collection is now in shelf order and the following is a summary of the arrangement of the Griffis papers.

Current chinese activity along the northern frontier of India, and Peking's claims to much of this area, have focused attention on a remote and sparsely populated region whose arid reaches, blanketed by perpetual snow, have never held a central position on the stage of world history. The history of Ladakh, where controversy currently rages over conflicting claims to Aksaichin, the Chang Chenmo Valley, Kurnak Fort, Spangur, and Demchok, has been characterized by instability and turmoil. Squeezed between Tibet, India, Kashmir, and the autonomous Muslim Rajahs of Baltistan, Ladakh as an independent entity suffered a precarious existence.

The immediate purpose of this study is to describe an interesting and rather bizarre episode in nineteenth century Chinese-British relations. It concerns the so-called “Canton City Question” of the 1840's, and I hope to show that the traditional accounts of this incident may have been misleading and, in some cases, inaccurate.

Education on western lines began in India by the middle of the nineteenth century with the establishment of a few high schools and colleges in the larger cities of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Poona. The three oldest universities in India, those at the “Presidency” capitals of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay were incorporated in 1858 and the first graduates in arts and law came out soon thereafter. Normally most of the arts graduates entered the middle ranks of the administrative services and received, according to the standards of the times, relatively attractive remuneration. Also, they were greatly respected in the middle class society of those days. The law graduates also did well as advocates and lower grade judges, and a few even won such coveted posts as seats on the benches of the High Courts.

In the thirty years since the appearance of K. S. Latourette's A History of Christian Missions in China the published materials in this vast field have been accumulating at a good pace, and an increasing number of mission-society archives have been opened to research. However, very little such research has been done. While Professor Latourette's work provides a matchless foundation for further contributions, few aspects of the subject have received thorough monographic treatment.

The twenty years which have elapsed since the adoption of the 1940 Constitution of the Mongolian People's Republic have witnessed important social, economic, and political transformations in the life of the Mongol nation and in the structure of its public authority, especially in the field of local government. All these changes have in a direct way affected the substantive rights and duties of the mass of the citizenry and are intimately tied to the continuing progression of the Mongol society, under the paternalistic guidance of Moscow and its native disciples in Ulan-Bator, along the socalled “non-capitalist path of transition to socialism.” As reflected in the organizational evolution of the instrumentalities of local rule, the record of the legislative and governmental reforms of this period furnishes valuable evidence on the prospective course of the country's future development following the promulgation on July 6, 1960, of a new, “socialist-inspired” Constitution and the inauguration of an era of fundamental reorientation in all areas of public and private activity in pursuance of an official campaign to complete the building of “socialism” in Outer Mongolia.

The institutional foundations of the Tokugawa daimyo have been obscured by the lack of insight which historians have traditionally shown into the history of the Ashikaga period and, in particular, into the late Ashikaga, or Sengoku, age. Like the Dark Ages in Europe, this chapter of Japanese history has been accepted in historiography as a dark and formless era of war and trouble. Japanese historians have dismissed the Sengoku period as a time of ge-koku-jō when the political order was capriciously turned upside down by unworthy leaders. The colorful Western historian, James Murdoch, has heaped his most caustic invectives upon the main figures in Ashikaga history. Of the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate he claimed, “Takauji may indeed have been the greatest man of his time, but that is not saying very much, for the middle of the fourteenth century in Japan was the golden age, not merely of turncoats, but of mediocrities.”1 To Murdoch the Sengoku period was a “vile” age when the Japanese people showed, as he put it, a “lust for war and slaughter … utterly beyond human control,” and only the timely arrival of the “great trio” of daimyo, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, saved the day for Japan.

In recent years, the Philippines, along with numerous other “developing” nations of the world, has experienced an accelerated change in many of its basic social institutions. To put it simply, we can describe these changes as part of the transition from a traditionalized, agriculturally oriented socio-economic structure to one more in line with the goals and institutions of a modern industrial society. The actual situation, however, is more complex, and a number of other factors not necessarily related to industrialization have been involved. These include changes in the demographic structure, shifting loci of political power, and the “demonstration effect” of numerous external agencies which have widened both taste and aspiration horizons.

Despite the recurrent ravages of fire and earthquake and the devastation of the Pacific War, a sizeable volume of documentary material survives from Japan's Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Although its government archives may not be as large as those of the older centralized states of western Europe, the written record of the daily life of the Japanese people compares favourably with that of any other people over the same period. Several factors have counterbalanced Japan's unusually high incidence of natural calamities. At the time, literacy was more widespread than in most other countries and paper was plentiful and reasonably cheap. The “Tokugawa system” was effectively designed to reduce social, occupational, and geographic mobility to a minimum, so that, particularly in rural areas, a given family occupied the same station and fulfilled the same role for a long period. To a lesser extent, this was true even of commercial families. The popular idea of the impermanence of trade as a vocation was true only relative to the ideally almost immutable situation in agriculture. Strangely enough, it was the daimyo, members of the highest class, who, at least in the earlier period, were most mobile. Because of the continuity of family roles over long periods, records of, say, the late seventeenth century still had some relevance for descendants in the mid-nineteenth century, and so they tended to be preserved. Particularly in cities and towns, the rapid changes associated with the breakup of the Tokugawa system were undoubtedly accompanied by the loss of many records.