The foreign communities in China and Japan in the days of the treaty ports and foreign settlements – roughly the century between 1840 and 1940 – have inspired many publications. These range in style from a variety of novels (of very varying quality) to serious scholarly studies, and date from the 1850s onwards. Some contemporary accounts have also stood the test of time and are reprinted frequently. But when one looks at Korea, the scene is bleak. There are, indeed, some original accounts of Korea that have enjoyed the occasional revival. Judging by what is in print, or has been in recent years, Isabella Bird Bishop's writings seem still to find a ready modern audience, as do the memoirs of the American diplomat William Sands. But, compared with what is available on Shanghai or Yokohama, this is small beer. Donald Clark's account of the foreign community in Korea is, therefore, very welcome.

Clark himself comes from a missionary family and was brought up in Seoul, now the South Korean capital. That background has served him well in two previous books about Seoul and its monuments, which also touch upon the foreign community in passing. One was written with his father in the late 1960s, the other was co-authored with James Grayson, the current Professor of Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is also the author of a work that will be known to few in Britain, about the Seoul Foreign Cemetery, which performs for Korea, the functions of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, a group well-known to many members of the RSAA. In writing this book, he has clearly been aided by the existence of family papers and he also knows well the records of the American missionary groups. He makes good use of these and also of US official records. As a Korean scholar, he is also in a position to draw on the small amount of information available from Korean books and articles. He has also made use of British official records in the Public Record Office, but not the smaller, but still interesting, collections from missionary sources. So there is still work to be done!

What Clark has done so far, however, is to provide a fascinating account of a small but very diversified community. Korea was always unusual in East Asia, in two ways.