In reviewing the progress of Asian studies and of this Association, it is necessary both to point with pride and to view with alarm.

For the former, no doubt, there is some justification. There has been a great increase since the early beginnings at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale. Looking back over the last thirty years, one can recall the new stimulus to Far Eastern studies in the 1930's provided by David Stevens at the Rockefeller Foundation through his support of Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies and fellowship programs for American trainees in Tokyo and Peking. The imagination and initiative of these men and a few others laid important foundations.

Practically all accounts of British intervention in support of the Manchu rulers of China against the Taiping rebellion present it as a calculated and deliberate change of policy by the British government which followed more or less immediately upon the ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin and of the Convention of Peking at the end of 1860. Having forced extensive commercial and diplomatic concessions from the Manchu government by these treaties, so the usual argument runs, the Western powers in China, led by Great Britain, quickly set about helping this just-defeated enemy suppress a domestic rebellion which, in the view of many modern historians, offered a more hopeful and progressive alternative to the Chinese people than did the continuance of Manchu rule, but which was regarded as a threat to their interests by these powers.

Scholars are agreed that the most significant literary development of the O Chien-an period, which coincided with the collapse of the Eastern Han empire, was the rise of the five word poem to a position of dominance in the field of Chinese poetry. Ts'ao Chih (A.D. 192–232) probably made the greatest individual contribution to the emergence of this verse form. It is my purpose to discuss the way in which he made use of a particular theme, that of the neglected wife, in his five word poetry.

The theme of the neglected wife is a very old one. It is only one variation of what might be called the sexual allegory for the relationship between minister and ruler. As such, its origins can be traced to the earliest Chinese literature. As Hellmut Wilhelm has remarked: “According to the symbolism of the Book of Changes, the official stands to the ruler in the relationship of Yin to Yang. Love affairs are therefore frequently used to symbolize a ruler-official relationship.” Although the love songs in the Shih ching probably originated in folk tradition, the accepted Confucian interpretation made the woman typify the minister and the lover the prince.

When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 andwas thereby rocketed into international prominence, the literary and theological worlds were afflicted with a rash of speculation as to whether or not his ideas were basically Christian. “The God of Gitanjali is no impersonal, imperturbable absolute of Hindu philosophy, but…whether He be explicitly Christ or not, He is at least a Christ-like God, and the experience of His suppliant and lover is one with the deepest core of all Christian experience.” “The ideas of Rabindranath, like those of so many thinkers of modern India, have often been quite wrongly assigned to Indian sources.” “In Rabindranath we get a glimpse of what the Christianity of India will be like….”

The number of persons who perished in the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756 has long been a matter of controversy, especially intense since the Indian viceroyalty of Lord Curzon of Kedleston. Two scholars, C. R. Wilson and S. C. Hill, and their patron, Lord Curzon, have maintained that HolwelPs narrative declaring that 123 persons perished in the Black Hole is substantially true. On the other hand, J. H. Little has argued that the Black Hole tragedy is a “gigantic hoax,” exaggerated beyond all proportions, since only a few men, in his opinion, were confined in the Black Hole, and of them only those who had received severe wounds during the actual fighting died. While English scholars have generally followed the Curzon- Wilson-Hill school, Indian scholars have recently come to accept Jadunath Sarkar's opinion that probably not more than sixty were confined in the Black Hole.