“ The warlords of twentieth–century china have received little scholarly attention.”. This omission is due, apart from the reasons viven in Mr. Sheridan's ‘Preface’, to the historical significance of the men and their period not being fully appreciated. What sort of men were they ? How did they rise to such great power? What effect did their abuse of power have on Chinese society ? Why did the May Fourth Movement, the Washington Conference, the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the reorganization of the Kuomintang, and the May 30th Movement use the misrule of the warlords as their back–drop? How far did the warlords undo the work of the restoration in the 1860“s and 19870”s ? These are but a few pertinent questions. In a period of merely 16 years (1912–28), over 1, 300 warlords had fought more than 140 provincial and interprovincial wars. Such a period is bund to be complicated but should not daunt the curiosity of the historian.

In his article, ‘Some notes on the devshirme’, Dr. V. L. Ménage deals in some detail with the vexed problem of the status in law of the members of the Ottoman slave institution. His comments are directed toward what he gives as Dr. Papoulia' conclusion concering the problem, that ‘the čikma, the “passing-out” from the various training-schools, amounted to a modified manumission and bestowed a status comparable with that of the “client” (mawlā) in the classical Muslim world’. Having quoted passages from two documents of the mid-fifteenth century and a notation in the comtemporary histories of the same period, Dr. Ménage conculdes: ‘These three examples suffice to show that—in the middle years of the fifteenth century at least—a čikma did not automatically bring with it legal manumission; thus although the čikma as an institution seems to imitate the Mamluk kharj—and the term itself sounds very like a calque—it differed from it fundamentally in that the ič oghlani, unlike the Mamlūk, was not (or Perhaps not necessarily) then ceremonially manumitted’.

Dans leurs éditions respectives du manuscrit ouï;gour de Touen-houang, Pelliot chinois 3509, où figure le conte bouddhique du Prince Bien-pensant et de son mauvais frère, Huart et Pelliot ont tous deux lu, à la p. 2, 1. 4, ‘qar(i)š’, sans avoir réussi, cependant, à expliquer cette forme de façon satisfaisante. En fait, le mot doit se lire qars, défini par Kāšγarī comme ‘vêtement (=étoffe) de poil de chameau et de laine de mouton’, mot.qui a persisté en čagatay au sens de ‘châle, bande d'étoffe dont on se ceint les reins’ (cf. M. Pavet de Courteille, Dictionnaire turc-oriental, Paris, 1870, 400; et W. Radloff, Versucheines Wörterbuches der Türk-Dialecte, II, St. Pétersbourg, 1899, col. 205). On rencontre Le mot qars à maintes reprises, d'ailleurs, dans d'autres manuscrits ouïgours du dixième siècle provenant de la grotte murée de Touen-houang. De ces textes, il ressort: (1) que les pièces de qars étaient qualifiées, dans presque tous les cas et à l'exclusion de toute autre couleur, de ‘blanches’ (yürüŋ) ou de ‘rouges‘ (qizil); (2) que les pièces de qars rouge valaient plus que les pièces de qars blanc dans la proportion de deux à trois: autrement dit, deux pièces rouges valaient trois pièces blanches; (3) qu'un mounton valait quatre pièces de qars rouge, ou encore, dans un autre cas, trois pièces de rouge et une pièce de blanc, de même qu'une peau (de mounton ?) valait deux pièces de qars rouge; (4) que le qars était une étoffe tissée (cf. notamment qars toqiyur, ‘ils tissent le qars’, à la p. 2, 1. 4, du ms. Pelliot chinois 3509 précité); et(5) que le qars pouvait servir à faire des vêtements, vu qu'il était commandé par tant de tonluγ (= la quantité d'étoffe requise pour un costume).

May (God) bless the beginning (of the text) and favour its ending with good fortune. This is both said and written by Sīdi Sālim in praise of his Shaykh. Shaykh Mā' al-'Aynayn, may God prolong his life.

This tract is an answer to Ḥanbalī claims; it is badly arranged with much repetition and there are no new ideas in it. It is an example of theological controversy at a low level of intelligence. A summary will show the conclusions reached by Muslims about the speech of God.

More than 40 years ago, the private libraries built up by kings chulalong korn (1868–1910)and vajiravudh (1910–25) were handed over by King prajadhipok to the National Library of Thailand; and included in the gift were 10 large volumes countaining a typewritten transcript of manuscript diaries of chulalongkorn which had been made for vajiravudh in 1917. After the abolition of the a absolute monarchy in 1932, the Thai Fine Arts Department, created to take charge of the National Library and associated institutions, began to offer to inquirers seeking books to publish for free distribution at the cremations of their relative and friends portions of these diaries, the size of the portion tailored to meet theit budgets for this purpose. The first portion, of 74 printed pages, was distributed to guests at the cremation of Princess Arunawadī, a daughter of King Mongkut, in 1933. Nineteen parts were so published before the second World War, followed by volumes in 1944 and 1946; but it was not until the early 1960's that the project was resumed and the final volumes published, one in 1963 and two in 1965, the twenty-fourth and final volume appearing for the cremation of mm čhao Čhongkonnī Watthanawong, a grand-daughter of king Chulalongkorn.