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.

More than one third of Asia is dry. From the Red Sea almost to the Pacific are a series of deserts and semideserts, the product of continentality, mountain patterns, and atmospheric circulation. Two areas of extreme aridity are present in die Rub al Khali of southern Arabia and the Takla Makan of western China, both essentially rainless and lifeless. Elsewhere, aridity fades off into subhumid lands with marginal potentials for settlement.

In this paper I propose to look at Southeast Asian history for the most part before the era of European political control. My object is on the one hand to avoid the distortions of the picture caused by the wealth of writings on European activities in the area, which have tended to thrust into the background die history of the peoples of the area, and on the other hand to convey some idea of the importance of their history as a field of study today. Incidentally, it is a field in which most of the progress has been made by scholars whose names are largely unknown outside the esoteric circles of orientalism.

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.

The growth of China's population and die veracity of the figures that purport to measure it are both puzzles. Critical in die solutions to both puzzles are die records of an alien dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1911. All reconstructions of the growth of the population in recent centuries trace to one or the other of die two Ch'ing series—die local reports ordered by the emperor Ch'ien-lung in 1741, or the survey that began in 1909 and ended with the revolution in 1911. The results of the registration of 1953–1954 are consistent with the first Ch'ing activity. The statistics of the Republic of China had lineal descent from both series, but at a level of total population consistent with the limited results of the 1909–1911 survey.

Despite the existence of an enormous literature dealing with the Meiji Restoration and its origins, it is still surprisingly difficult to acquire precise information about some aspects of Japanese society in the middle of the nineteenth century. One such difficulty is that of obtaining general quantitative data about the great feudal domains (han) which constituted the major political and economic units of the country. This is not to say that details concerning the domains are impossible to find. Many records are readily available, even in print, and some have been used by scholars to support or illustrate general statements. It is commonly accepted, for example, that agrarian productivity increased greatly in Japan between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and that land dues were extremely high, especially at the end of the period. It is possible to cite domains as examples for each of these generalisations. On the other hand, it is never very clear whether the examples themselves are typical or merely random, how far they approximate to or differ from the norm. Nor has there been much attempt to discover whether the wide differences which existed between one domain and another in these matters followed any identifiable pattern. It is with these problems that the present article will deal.

In China during the Ch'ing period, as before, many Confucian values were so family-centered as to tolerate degrees of nepotism not acceptable in some other societies. Ideally, of course, Confucian values admitted of no conflict between loyalty to the Emperor and loyalty to close relatives and friends. Nevertheless, conflicts between public and private interests were recognized at least as early as the Meng-tzu and were typified in such expressions as “robbing the public to help the private” (chiakung chi-ssu) and “putting the family first and the nation last” (hsien chia-tsu erh hou kuo-chia). But whatever may have been the nepotistic intent of officials, there was during the Ch'ing period, at least before the Taiping rebellion, a great centralization of imperial authority.

The British administrative frontier in India had widely differing effects on the political and social structures of the regions into which it moved from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to generalize on the impact of the administration, because the regions into which it moved differed in their political and social structures, and because British administration and ideas about administration, both in India and in Great Britain, changed markedly throughout this hundred year period.

One hundred years ago the patient efforts of Townsend Harris bore fruit and on July 4, 1859, Japan opened her doors to traders from the West. It was a small beginning, for Consul Harris' treaty allowed foreigners to live and trade at only three Japanese ports; two of which, Nagasaki and Hakodate, lacked the hinterland to make them much more than coaling or victualling stations. The third port was a small fishing village of twenty or thirty huts. It was built on a mud bank, backed by an odious swamp and commanded by surrounding hills. The Japanese called the place Yokohama.

It has often been claimed that the Dai Nihon shi is one of the towering monuments of traditional Japanese historiography, and it is indeed a work of rare scope: a general history of Japan in 397 kan, or chapters, dealing primarily with the affairs of the imperial dynasty from its legendary founding in 660 B.C. to the healing of Japan's only extended dynastic schism in 1392. The entire text is in literary Chinese, and the pattern of organization is that of the Chinese dynastic histories. The Dai Nihon shi was conceived by Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701), the second daimyo of the Mito han, and compiled by the Confucian retainers of Mitsukuni and his successors. Two large sections of chronological Main Annals and Biographies (approximately half of the finished book) were completed by 1715, but the rest remained unfinished at the time of the Meiji Restoration.

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.

In the years that followed the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911, China was ruled by military men who set up virtually independent governments in the various provinces. This inquiry into the policies of Yen Hsi-shan, governor of die north-western province of Shansi between 1911 and 1930, has been undertaken in the hope that a study of one of these warlords will result in a broader understanding of war-lordism as a political phenomenon and in this way illuminate further the whole subject of regional government in China during the early decades of the twentieth century.

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 Meiji Restoration of 1868, unquestionably the most important event in modern Japanese history, brought in its wake social and economic changes of a revolutionary nature. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu, the subsequent abolition of the han system, the equalization of classes, and the establishment of a conscript army, the need for a hereditary military class ceased to exist. Certainly, the presence of a samurai class, numbering approximately 1,800,000, or 400,000 families, stranded in a society in process of divesting itself of all feudal fetters, constituted an acute problem. The continued existence of this vast army of unemployed retainers could have easily hamstrung all efforts to modernize. And it is hardly surprising that the new Meiji leaders realized at the inception of the new regime that if the work of the Restoration was to be completed successfully, it was necessary to work out a satisfactory settlement for the samurai class.

A key economic, social, and political problem for the nations of Southeast Asia is posed by the economically important and abundantly organized Chinese minorities in their midst. The “economic stranglehold” of the “clannish” Chinese is often cited as the root of all evil by resentful local peoples, and on occasion these feelings have exploded in anti-Chinese demonstrations or riots.