In February 1276, the Southern Sung capital Lin-an (modern Hang-chou) fell to the Mongols, and the last Sung emperor, Chao Hsien (Kung-ti ), was taken captive. With the aid of its loyal ministers, the remaining members of the royal house fled to the south. In June the nine-year-old Chao Cheng was enthroned in Foochow as emperor (Tuan-tsung ). However, with high officials in Fukien defecting one after the other to the Mongols, the royal house was forced before long to retreat by sea further south to Kwangtung. In March 1277 the Sung stronghold at Canton also fell and the imperial family hastily fled to Mei-wei , in the vicinity of the present-day Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong. In November, under the mounting pressure of the Mongols, they retreated south-west along the Kwangtung coast. Since Chao Hsien was never likely to resume control and there seemed to be some chance of taking refuge in the vassal kingdoms of Champa and An-nam (in present-day Vietnam), there followed a flurry of Chinese emigration. The tragedy of the last Sung emperor has evoked much sympathy in history, but the story of the migration and search for refuge of some Sung officials has not been fully explored. This paper attempts to give a descriptive account and present a brief analysis of the background factors which shaped the course of migration, as well as its impact on the increased Chinese cultural influence in Vietnam.

Human nature is inevitably concerned with the past which, for nations no less than for individuals, forms a framework for present attitudes and sometimes a justification for present actions. In the developed countries of the West this framework is easily and frequently obscured, although its presence can be readily demonstrated. For those nations which have, until recently, been controlled by one or other of the European powers, however, the past provides a framework to which national appeal is often made in a particularly explicit way.

The American involvement in Viet Nam has not unnaturally led to the assumption that Chinese expansionism has had a long history of activity in that region, and not a few American writers, notably of journalistic fiber, have come out openly to say that it is really the Chinese that the American forces are fighting against, citing at the same time, hundreds of, even a thousand, years in which Viet Nam was under the control of the Chinese, and innumerable occasions on which it was invaded by the Chinese, that Chinese aggression, on the basis of encroachments into Viet Nam, is a proven fact, and unarguable. On the other hand, there have been a few, notably scholars, who have contended otherwise, that, although imperialism may have infected certain Chinese dynasties, the dominant characteristic, indeed, in the territorial expansion of the Chinese has been their willingness to accept any “barbarian” outsider who would but learn Chinese and accept Chinese customs, as Chinese; also, that China itself is composed of people who are descended from “barbarians” absorbed into the Chinese state by the acculturation process; that the Chinese, while indeed invading their peripheral states on frequent occasions, have done so almost without exception on provocations, such as coups, or attempted coups of the existing friendly-to-China dynasties, and so forth.

It is evident from the brief historical survey presented in this paper that the French found in Cambodia well-established Chinese communities with a long tradition of indirect rule. My argument may be summarised in four propositions:

1. Contact between Cambodia and China has continued more or less uninterrupted since the first century of this era — and perhaps longer. Unlike early Indian contact, which produced distinctly Indian forms in the indigenous cultures of Southeast Asia, contact with China appears to have left them relatively unmarked. Khmer culture is definitely not sinic in language, social structure, religion, or the arts.

2. The long history of Chinese contact was not associated with extensive Chinese settlement in Cambodia until the fifteenth century, when there occurred a marked change in the nature of the Cambodian economy. Throughout the Chen-la and the Angkorean periods, the relative homogeneity of the country did not encourage internal trade, and the small amount of foreign trade evident in the capital was limited almost entirely to luxury goods for the court. After 1400, the Cambodian economy came to depend more and more upon trade, a phenomenon that was associated with the establishment of a growing Chinese population in Cambodia, primarily in Phnom-Penh.

3. The evidence of trade relations and large migrations suggests that by the middle of the nineteenth century the Chinese population of Phnom-Penh was mainly Cantonese, possibly with a smaller number of Hokkien. In Kampot, on the other hand, along the coast of the Gulf of Siam, a large number of Hainanese settled following the establishment, in the eighteenth century, of a trading centre at Hatien. We do not know the size of this population, but we do know that by 1860 it was primarily engaged in growing pepper. It is clear that by the time of the French Protectorate was established in 1864, the Chinese community in Phnom-Penh, whatever its make-up, numbered in the thousands and controlled practically all the trade of the country, foreign and domestic.

4. The concept of indirect rule over the Chinese in Cambodia dates from at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. This system was not very formal, however, and the legally denned system of congregations in neighbouring Annam, dating from 1814, became the model for the French colonial administrators when they eventually came to consider the “Chinese problem” in Cambodia.

This study will focus its attention on the entrepreneurial role of the overseas Chinese in Thailand and their changing status within the context of the Thai political dynamics. The 1960 census of Thailand reports a population of 26,257,860, of which 409,508 are Chinese citizens either because of birth in China or registration with Chinese diplomatic officials at the age of sixteen. However, observers generally place the number of persons who habitually speak a Chinese dialect and conform to Chinese behaviour patterns in most social situations at about three million to three and a half million. This would make the Chinese community in Thailand, after that in Malaysia, the largest single group of the fifteen odd million Chinese resident abroad.

On July 23, 1962, the International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian Question in Geneva came to a close with the formal signature of a Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos and a Protocol to the Declaration. The Conference had been in session for over a year; fourteen governments participated, and all of them became parties to the agreements reached.

The romantic Filipino revolutionary and “irreconcilable” Artemio Ricarte y Vibora was born in 1866 at Batac, Ilocos Norte. A teacher of Spanish in Cavite by profession but a soldier by inclination, Ricarte secretly joined the independence-minded “blood brother-hood,” the Katipunan. Subsequently, he became an officer in the anti-Spanish Philippine uprising of 1896–1897. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Ricarte was one of those recruited by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo to cooperate with the Americans in destroying Spain's authority in the Philippines. As the commander of a military district in Luzon, Ricarte was rewarded by the revolutionary government with the title of General. As early as December of 1898, Ricarte doubted that the Americans would willingly withdraw from the Islands, and he submitted to Aguinaldo a plan for an immediate uprising against the American troops in Manila. Though this plot was frustrated, the outbreak of fighting on February 4, 1899, which resulted in the bloody Philippine-American War, occurred in an area immediately adjacent to that controlled by Ricarte, and some observers believe that Ricarte's personal belligerence contributed significantly to the edginess of the Filipino soldiers.

Late in the seventeenth century the Phaulkon fiasco encouraged Thailand to rid herself of the possibility of European domination — an endeavour whose success no doubt owed much to unsettled conditions in Europe. It is not until the mid-nineteenth century, following the ascension of the enlightened King Mongkut, that the renewed activity of Western diplomats, traders and missionaries provide the memoirs from which may be reconstructed a relatively coherent description of the distributional pattern of the Thai centres.

It is not infrequent for some Filipino historians to write that the Filipino people have inherited a, great deal from both Oriental and Occidental cultures without losing their racial identity, and that before the coming of Spain and Christianity to the Philippines during the sixteenth century, the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos had commercial, political, and cultural relations with India, China, Japan, and the rest of Malaysia. This view, however, requires certain clarifications and qualifications. The term “Filipino” now-a-days is mainly a political one and generally denotes the native inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago who are subject to a definite and internationally recognized central government. Seventy years or more ago, the native inhabitants of the Philippines were called “indios” and not “Filipinos”, as this latter term was reserved for Spaniards who were born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from those Spaniards who were born in Spain. Historically speaking, in spite of the fact that the present-day Filipinos and their ancestors belong to a wider race, they did not constitute a “people” in any political sense. This is not to deny that their ancestors shared in a common cultural matrix. But if they were a “people” in this sense, then they, with the present-day Indonesians and other Malays, belong to one people. As pointed earlier, the concept of a Filipino people belonging to one national community is a recent one, and the process of integrating them more and more into a national community is still going on. It might be meaningful to maintain that the different Malay peoples at present are segmented or divided into different political entities.

In 1856 a Muslim Sultanate was founded in Yunnan, the southwestern Chinese province that borders Burma. In 1873, seventeen years later, this Sultanate was annihilated. The Muslim inhabitants of Yunnan are known as the Panthays.

There are several versions concerning Muslim origins in Yunnan. A tradition held by the Panthays themselves tells that the Emperor of China requested the Prophet Mohammed to send some Muslims to help him to get rid of evil spirits. The Prophet sent him 360 men, with whose aid the evil spirits were routed. The Arabs were welcomed with great honour and were allowed to settle near the capital. In course of time their numbers increased to such an extent that the Imperial Government was disturbed. The Muslims were therefore dispersed to the border areas of the Empire and resettled there. This account was related to the British mission which visited the Panthay Sultanate, by the Governor of the town of Momien. A very similar Chinese version tells of a Muslim army, several thousand strong, which came to the rescue of the Emperor of China at his request. After quelling the rebellion, the Muslims feared to return home, because during their long sojourn abroad they had been polluted by pork and other prohibited things, and decided to remain in China. Eventually they were sent to Yunnan and other places and became loyal subjects of the Emperor.

Until comparatively recent times South-East Asia hardly entered into Western historical teaching and was of marginal concern for orthodox European research. While the world's societies stood in virtual isolation from each other, records were generally unknown and unstudied beyond their domestic orbit. Where Western historians ranged outside the Graeco-Roman and Middle Eastern spheres in any depth, their interest was individual and antiquarian rather than the reflection of their civilisation's historical bias. Because the techniques and preoccupations of modern scholarship had not emerged, moreover, such enquiries were mainly devoid of near-contemporary inference or consideration of those problems to which the social sciences later directed attention. World history, whether of narrow or wide conspectus, still remained to be elicited. In the passage of human affairs, the great civilisations had travelled in separate compartments.

On his mother's side, W. Cameron Forbes was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on his father's, the grandson of John Murray Forbes, who made his fortune in the China clipper trade. He carried in his heredity the shrewd business ability of the one and the liberalism of the other. In Hofstadter's turn of phrase, he was the patrician as liberal. His wealth, his education — the best available (Milton Academy, Hopkinson School, Harvard) — would have entitled him to admittance to the innermost recesses of post-Civil War Republicanism. Yet he remained at best only affiliated with that party, and at heart an outspoken Independent. In 1892, on graduation from Harvard, he joined Stone and Webster, later gained experience in business as officer and director of several Boston banks, and then, just before the turn of the century, joined the family firm of J. M. Forbes and Co., Merchants.

With the end of the East India Company's monopoly of trade to China in 1834, relations with the Celestial Empire came under the direction of the Foreign Secretary in London, who appointed a Superintendent of Trade, subsequently British Plenipotentiary and also, under the Colonial Office, Governor of Hong Kong. In Southeast Asia, no similar arrangements were made. The three Straits Settlements remained under the Company's administration, with a Governor controlled by the Supreme Government in India, between 1834 and 1851 via the subordinate Bengal Government. The “foreign relations” of the Settlements in regard to indigenous states tended to be handled by the Company's or by naval officers. Relations with the Dutch were handled in London and The Hague by the Foreign Office and its envoys. At various times the appointment was urged of a Superintendent or Plenipotentiary or Commissioner to conduct British diplomacy in South-east Asia, but none ever eventuated. This may seem an unimportant point. But it calls attention to certain basic traditions in British policy in Southeast Asia, as distinct from China, and the fact that the appointment was not made despite pressure for it calls attention to a challenge to these traditions in the little studied mid-century period, a challenge, however, never pressed hard and ultimately only partly successful.

This paper examines three aspects of the Opium trade in Szechwan from 1881, when for the first time there is evidence that China consumed as much native as foreign opium and that Szechwan was both the largest producer and consumer, until 1911, when the cultivation of the poppy was completely suppressed in the province as a result of the vigorous imperial campaign against the trade. It will consider first, the demand for opium who smoked it and why; second, the production of opium, how it fitted into and contributed toward the economy of the province; finally, the character of the suppression campaign of 1906–1911 as it affected Szechwan will be considered. The conclusions of the paper may be summarised as follows. (1) While the expansion of the opium habit in Szechwan, as in the rest of China, had no one cause, in Szechwan it has for its background a prospering society whose values and accepted goals had not kept pace with its economic expansion, a society which provided increasing wealth and leisure on the one hand, but only limited opportunities for socially approved spending on the other. (2) The rapid expansion of opium production in late nineteenth century Szechwan was part of the development of a market economy both within the province and in its relations with the rest of China. (3) The opium suppression campaign, because it undermined a developing economy, was much less popular in Western China than it was in the east, and contributed to the widespread unrest in those parts, which in turn led to the revolution of 1911.

Urbanization and bureaucratization are usually connected with a high rate of social mobility in western industrialized societies. In Thailand, however, mobility has declined at least between certain strata of Thai society following the consolidation of a bureaucratic elite in the expanding urban centre of Bangkok. The growing size, the monopolization of certain status symbols, the development of a distinct subculture and the concentration of economic and political power are indications that the bureaucratic elite is developing into a social class. It is therefore concluded that urbanization and bureaucratization in formerly loosely structured societies may lead to the formation of a class system and to a temporary decline of social mobility.

A naval battle which decided the future of the Philippines for centuries to come was fought in 1617 outside Manila Bay. Very few historians, however, have written about this important event. I consider it worthwhile, therefore, to give an account of the battle, based on information gathered from available sources.

In recent years quite a number of States in Africa and Asia have gained independence. These States have three characteristics in common from an archival point of view: they are of smaller size, they are situated in tropical areas and the bulk of their archives and records dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.