North China in a.d. 546 was the scene of a contest between two men, de facto rulers of the fractions of Northern Wei which had held the entire area for over one hundred fifty years but had been split in the middle of the previous decade. One of the two men, Kao Huan,b headed the state called Eastern Wei, in Shansi and Honan, which became the dynasty of Northern Chʻi under his descendants. The other, Yü-wen Tʻai,e ruled Western Wei, in Shensi, later to become Northern Chou. The ensuing half-century witnessed the final victory of Northern Chou over Northern Chʻi, the usurpation of Northern Chou by the founder of the Sui dynasty, and Sui's destruction of the last of the Southern Dynasties to unify all of China and usher in the era of Tʻang.

In 1824 Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), the Adam Smith of France, undertook to forecast the future of the British Dominion in India. He did this in an essay entitled Essai historique sur I'origine, les progrès et les résultats probables de la souveraineté des Anglais aux Indes (Paris, 1824), subsequently included as a chapter in his definitive Cours complet d'economie politique pratique, first published in 1828–29. This essay thus appeared eleven years after the East India Company was given a new charter in 1813, but one stripped of its former trade monopoly, and six years before the transformation of the Company's dominion into what subsequently became the British Indian Empire. The officers of this new dominion would “have been much surprised to see the Indian flag hoisted in Delhi only a hundred and twenty-nine years later.” But would Say have been surprised?

The predominance of British interests in China from the closing years of the eighteenth century up until the nineteen thirties has left us a voluminous documentation, not only of the activities of the British in China but also of the activities of other people, foreigners as well as the Chinese themselves. The English language records of the Foreign Office and missionary archives in London have already been consulted by scholars from all over the world. The recent addition of Chinese language materials, deposited at the Public Record Office (hereafter, PRO), undoubtedly makes London one of the most important centers outside China for research in modern Chinese history.

English repositories are gradually organizing and indexing their large holdings of missionary material under the guidance of trained archivists. The general practice is not to bind their manuscripts, but to place them in boxes arranged chronologically by country or, where missionary activity has been intense, by mission station within the country. Each box contains an index for material in that box. The larger societies have files on individual missionaries and the London Missionary Society has a painting or photograph of each individual it sent into the field. Gradually, comprehensive indexes to the whole archive are being prepared and registered with the National Register of Archives (Quality House, Quality Court, London W.C. 2). The National Register is mimeographing these guides, but in limited quantity.

The discovery and use of vernacular sources is a critical task for South Asia specialists. Area centers have produced scholars who are dissatisfied with English books and records as the primary source for understanding South Asia. The development of vernacular materials, however, has not kept pace with the new interests and attainment of language skills. Although individuals have unearthed caches of vernacular documents, no systematic effort is being made to publicize existing collections or to locate additional ones.

A wealth of information about individual land properties on Taiwan appears as part of the land records of various Chinese government agencies. The records contain reliable and accessible data on lowland properties since 1904 and on upland properties since about 1925. The purposes of this paper are to describe the information and its sources and to indicate some of the types of problems related to land properties which bear examination.