As regards the Mongols, our knowledge of their history, of their customs, of their way of life, our relations with them, England presents an interesting case. We do not know the extent of the material lost on the Continent, but, in this (for the Mongols) remote corner of Europe, (in places safe from their devastation) documentation is to be found. A monk of Saint Albans, the chronicler Matthew Paris who died in 1259, is an important source. He was the only person to preserve Ivo of Narbonne's confession (which reveals that an Englishman was one of the first envoys of the Mongols to King Bela of Hungary), the report of Bishop Peter of Russia given at the council of Lyons in 1245 and information about André of Longjumeau's mission after the council. Incidently, twice at the end of his Chronica Majora, in an entry for the year 1257, Matthew Paris refers to a manuscript concerning ‘Tartarorum immunditias, vitam (spurcissimam) et mores (…) necnon et Assessinorum furorem et superstitionem’. It is the same work which is mentioned by John of Oxnead, in his Chronka under the year 1258, as a written command (mandatum scriptum) sent to Simon de Montfort, containing letters the length of a Psalter, and entitled De vita et moribus Tartarorum (…) et de eorum fortitudine etguerra, et de adquisitionibus which was to be found in the book of Additions. Unfortunately this work has not survived. (Nevertheless it is tempting to see here a mention of William of Rubruck's report of his journey, which has the form of a letter and which was written in 1257, but which has little information about the Assassins. Later another Englishman, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon († 1294) met William of Rubruck and became interested in the Mongols.)

The two recent discussions of the chronology of Aśoka's early missionary activities, as described in his first Minor Rock Edict, came to different conclusions. For the idea of a 256-day pilgrimage, which stems ultimately from mistranslation, Falk had sought to substitute a calculation involving 256 non-consecutive Uposatha nights. Without detailed refutation of Falk's arguments, Norman rejected this result and retained the assumption of a date counted in days from the beginning of a regnal year. Falk's Vedic and Arthaśāstra material points, however, in the right direction. A description of Aśoka as 256-rātra-vyuṣṭo “having spent a 256-day season” would date his proclamation to the close of an eight-month campaigning season, corresponding closely with varṣā-rātra-uṣita Rāma (R 4.19.1), literally ‘having spent the rains season’, but dating the activity in question to the first day of autumn. Late Vedic and epic use of vyuṣṭa and instances of calculation by binary, apparently solar, weeks of 8 days and months of 32 days (of which eight would yield 256), suggest that Aśoka was seeking to give his proselytizing campaign the status of a religious observance defined in Kṣatriya terms. Arthaśāstra includes the proposition that a 32-day military month was used for administrative purposes in the field.

Just as in rock edicts the phrase [devānaṃpiyena] … abhisitena lekhite dates events to a regnal year, so [devānaṃpiyena] … vivuṭhena sāvane dates Aśoka's MRE proclamation, but with reference to his years of religious seniority. The additive chronology, more than two years plus more than one year, suggested by Norman and upheld by Falk, is supported by the syntax of the passage. It would tend to associate the MRE with Aśoka's 13th regnal year. Aśoka's epigraphs imply that, inspired perhaps by early residence in Ujjain, he was at first drawing on late Vedic and epic calendrical motifs, before starting to display a knowledge of Vinaya calendrical material in the pillar edicts.

Much has been written about the extraordinary artistic, religious and historic importance of the Thousand Buddha Cave Temples at Dunhuang, in Gansu province, western China. One hundred and twenty years ago, on 2 May, 1879, a Hungarian expedition reached Dunhuang. It is a little known fact that its members were to be the first western travellers to visit the cave temples there. Still less known is the influence of this expedition on Sir Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-born British archaeologist. This article examines a hitherto unstudied aspect of why Stein was in the position to become the first to arrive in Dunhuang after the important discovery was made. It is argued that the little known Hungarian expedition was a determining factor in prompting Stein to undertake the hazardous journey to Dunhuang. Furthermore the travel notes of these earlier Hungarian travellers throw light at the very unstable situation at the Dunhuang caves thirty years before Stein's visit. This information is likely to have influenced Stein's decision to take much of the material away for safe keeping as at the time of his visit the situation continued to deteriorate.