Tīmūr (or Tamerlane), the Barlas tribesman whose empire stretched from the Mediterranean to India in the early fifteenth century has been a much studied and much romanticized figure in the history of Central Asia. His displays of macabre and often brutal intimidation of enemies have become almost as legendary as his military prowess. Indeed, Western legend of Tīmūr is as full of spine-tingling grotesquerie as any Gothic novel, and has been embellished far beyond plausibility.

The Gurjara Pratīhāras have long been recognised as the leading royal house of northern India during the ninth and tenth centuries. A considerable number of copper plate and stone inscriptions have survived from Pratīhāra times and these have provided the requisite data for a reconstruction of the dynasty's political and social history. Following conventions established in the Gupta period if not before, the copper-plates of the Pratīhāras record grants of villages or land, while stone inscriptions typically recount the building of temples and the provision of gifts to enshrined divinities. A large number of temples from the Pratīhāra age have been preserved; some of these buildings have enjoyed the recent scholarly attention of the team working on the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture as well as the Temple Survey of the Archaeological Survey of India. In contrast, palatial architecture is virtually unknown. This is neither surprising nor unusual, there being little left of such buildings in any part of India from before the fourteenth century. This is due to the wide use of perishable building materials, notably wood, brick and stucco. In the case of the Pratīhāra rulers there is also the fact that their capital city of Kannauj (anc. Kānyakubja) has been completely destroyed. That the Pratīhāras were responsible for some building at Kannauj is indicated by the inscription, dated Harṣa year 276 (A.D. 882–3), from the shrine of Garībnāth at Pehowa. This inscription records, among many other things, that a temple of Viṣṇu Garuḍāsana was built by the Brāhmaṇa Bhūvaka on the banks of the river Gaṅgā in Bhojapura near Kānyakubja.

India during the period of the Mughal dynasty (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) is exceptionally well illuminated by a large body of historical literature, mainly in Persian. This literature followed the traditions of classical Persian historiography, the models of which like Yazdi's Zafarnama (a history of Timur) and Mir Khwand's Rauzatu's Safa (a history of the world), both written in the fifteenth century, were widely read in India. By its very volume, if nothing else, Mughal historiography has, however, to be studied and assessed separately. It may be recalled that when C. A. Storey made his great survey of Persian historical literature, works written on Indian history accounted for a major part of it providing 475 items, by authors (nos. 612–1087), as against 299 (nos. –611) concerned with Persia, and Central Asia and countries other than India. And among the works written in India those written in Mughal times again account for the overwhelming part.

Tan Sitong's summary execution at the close of the Hundred Days Reform (1898) inadvertently threw his wife, Li Run, into the public limelight. Following the September coup, the Guowen bao (National News) in Tianjin carried a story, entitled “Tan liefu zhuan” (Biography of the virtuous woman Tan), in which Li allegedly committed suicide by slashing her throat on learning of her husband's fate. She died broken-hearted, it was said, in protest against the wicked court ministers responsible for Tan's death. The story was quickly reprinted in Qingyi bao (The China Discussion), a periodical which Liang Qichao, a reformer in exile, started in Yokohama, Japan, as one prong of his anti-Qing campaign. The report on Li's demise continued to circulate. Twenty years later, when the Chinese scholar, Yi Zhongkui, compiled his Xin shishuo (Sequel to New Account of Tales of the World), he included a short biography of Li Run, based on the Guowen bao account. More recently, in her Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution 1850–1950, Ono Kazuko refers to the suicide story and wisely cautions about its veracity. But she adduces no evidence to confirm what actually did happen to Li Run in 1898.

Surprisingly, the history of Chinese studies in Britain has received little academic attention. In fact, its development in the twentieth century, and its problems and lack of world standing actually tell us much about the background to Sino-British relations, and especially about the resources available to enable those interested, for professional, business, evangelical or plainly academic reasons, to understand China and the Chinese. British sinology in the interwar period, if discussed at all, is routinely condemned by historians. After 1949 China was closed off to outside contacts; not surprisingly, commentators thereafter look back jealously to the opportunities for close and frequent contact that were available before the revolution but which they saw as being apparently wasted. This common judgement does not, however, do full justice to the scale of the underlying problems, especially financial ones, faced by academic institutions that taught Chinese.

With reference to the interesting article by Laxman S. Thakur in JRAS, vol. 4, part 3 (1994) entitled “A Tibetan inscription by lHa Bla-ma Ye-shes-'od from dKor (sPu) rediscovered”, I think the inscription cannot be attributed to Ye-shes-'od but rather to one of his descendants, the bstan-po lha-sras mentioned in 1. 5 whose name has unfortunately been effaced.