In the 1930s, the French Archaeological Delegation discovered a few fragments of Chinese lacquerwares at the Hellenistic town of Begram in Afghanistan. These lacquerware fragments, along with other artifacts from this site, have puzzled generations of scholars. Through a comparison of these fragments with lacquerwares discovered in China proper and beyond, this article offers a new chronology of the period from 74 BC to AD 23. This temporal frame corresponds to a time when the social life of Begram is vague in historical records, but it appears that the local aristocracy, for a period of about a hundred years, must have had some political and economic interactions with the late Western Han and Xin dynasties.

This article addresses the broad question of the sense of community in traditional Chinese villages, through consideration of popular cults found throughout the most highly developed region in Late Imperial China: the Jiangnan Delta. A key clue is a large-scale tenant-farmer revolt in Zhaowen County in 1846. When the uprising was suppressed, not only were twenty human ringleaders executed, but images of four local gods from village temples, who were believed to have sanctioned the rebellion, were also seized by the authorities and exposed for one year at the gates of the Zhaowen County City God temple. All four had three characteristics in common: (1) they were anthropomorphic, with human names; (2) they had living descendants of the same surname; (3) all were associated with stories involving miraculous protection of tax grain transport to the North. The descendants of these gods, all possession-type spirit mediums, or shamans, based in the villages, created the gods in response to the needs of their clients, large-scale landlords who bore responsibility for sea transport of tax grain to the North. In the mid-sixteenth century, fundamental socio-economic changes took place in the Jiangnan Delta. The landlords disappeared from the villages, leaving only the farmers, who were turning to cottage industries for cash to supplement inadequate food crop yields. The spirit mediums responded to the changes and modified their gods for a new set of clients, resulting in the survival of these cults down to the present day.

China underwent tremendous changes in social systems during the Republican period. Among these changes was the government's introduction into Chinese society of a new legal profession based on Western ideology. Relying mainly on Shanghai archival records, previous scholarship has suggested that, unlike the traditional litigation masters who had always been despised by the authorities, the new Chinese lawyers quickly rose to respectable social and economic status. However, the historical findings presented in the current article challenge this perception by showing that in a city with a more deeply rooted indigenous legal tradition and less influence from Western lawyers, as in Beijing, the new Chinese lawyers faced resistance from the legacy of the old legal culture that permeated the new system. For a considerable period of time after the establishment of the Republic, the people of Beijing still continued to hire unqualified, “phony” lawyers in lawsuits, and some of these phony lawyers had previously been litigation masters under the Qing dynasty. Although legal reform was instigated by the central government as a unified policy, its implementation was bound to vary in different regions according to the influence of the traditional legal culture. It is clear that the situation in Shanghai and other treaty ports does not represent the situation throughout the entire country, nor even in other coastal regions. Therefore, to make more sense of legal reform in China, one should evaluate the development of legal reform in a particular city or region against its social and ideological backdrop. This approach may provide insights not only into the legal reform of the Republican period, but also into the post-Mao era when once again a modern legal system based on the Western model has been introduced, this time within a socialist system.

This paper explores the relationship between local lineage social structure and the workings of tax registration in Qing China, through a case study providing documentary evidence of a level of precision that enables us to go beyond the findings of previous scholarship. In the first instance, it reconstructs a tax dispute where implications of the registration system come into play, based on rare records made by the taxpayers themselves. In doing so, it shows that (a) the registered “acreage” of land was in fact unrelated to any actual land whatsoever; (b) tax collection ceased to be able to rely on knowledge of the terrain and had to depend on knowing the social groups that could be held responsible for payment, while the cohesion and internal differentiation of these social groups was (in turn) underpinned by tax collection and registration; and (c) since the registration system did not permit the government to keep track of actual landholding, property rights had to be secured at the local community level. In conclusion, an attempt is made to speculate on the extent to which this specific case contributes to our knowledge of local social structure, the interactions between localities and the government, and the property regime of Qing China overall.

Relying on Vietnamese internal government documents now available to scholars for consultation in the No. 3 Vietnam National Archive in Hanoi, this article examines the linkage between the escalated Sino-Vietnamese territorial dispute and the increased Vietnamese mistreatment of Chinese residents and experts in northern Vietnam from 1974 to 1978 owing to state-sponsored Vietnamese anti-China/irredentist nationalism. During this period, Vietnamese leaders were seeking to forge national unity, solidify popular loyalty to the state, and mobilize domestic resources to defend the Vietnamese “fatherland” against the threat of Chinese territorial expansion. Specifically, this article demonstrates how these policies encouraged mistreatment of Chinese residents and experts, and created a climate of fear and paranoia within the Chinese community which caused the widespread flight of Chinese from northern Vietnam in 1977–1978.

From the mid-1990s, the Japanese government has promoted the creation of a “gender-equal society,” but since about 2000 this example of “state feminism” has faced a severe backlash. This article addresses the following questions about the phenomenon of Japanese state feminism, its history and its consequence: (1) How did the government policy for a “gender equal society” come into existence, and what explains its remarkably progressive nature? (2) What was the impact of the involvement of feminist scholars on policy-making? (3) What was the initial response to the policy? (4) What was the background of the backlash, who were the people and organizations involved, and what were the main arguments? (5) What has been the response to the backlash? (6) What are the connections and differences between the present controversy and the collaboration between feminism and the state in previous moments in Japanese history?

Islamic writings by Chinese Muslim scholars first attracted the attention of European researchers in the nineteenth century. Intermittently since then, the Islamic thought in these writings, expressed in the terminology and phrases of Chinese traditional thought, has been studied not only by European and American researchers but also Chinese and Japanese ones. The focus of such studies has generally been on elucidating the substantial influence of Chinese traditional thought on the Islamic thought of Chinese Muslim scholars, or on the relationship between Islam and Chinese traditional thought in Chinese Islamic writings, investigated either out of a historiographical concern for how Islam became established in China, or else from a philosophical concern to investigate an example of the “dialogue of civilizations”.

As recently as 2001, there were few lengthy discussions in English on the Imjin Waeran (Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea) aside from William George Aston's contribution to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (‘Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea’) from the 1870s and 1880s and a clutch of articles. The last nine years, though, have seen an extraordinary production of published works and the appearance of translations of primary sources, some full, some partial, some finished, and some on the way. Stephen Turnbull's Samurai Invasion appeared in 2002. Just three years later, in 2005, Samuel Hawley published The Imjin War, and now we have Kenneth M. Swope's A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail. The three books are each written from the perspective of the three main belligerents: Turnbull working from Japanese sources, Hawley from a Korean perspective, and Swope from Ming sources. These three offer detailed narratives on the war and allow English-language scholarship to set aside general narrative in favour of specific research agendas.

While the literature on modern Tibetan history is far from comprehensive, contributions to this field of studies have been formative over the last twenty years. With an ever-increasing availability of Tibetan-language source material along with new theoretical insights, the horizons for understanding modern Tibetan history are still expanding.

Thus sings Sangdhor in a metrical poem in praise of Tibetan versification, countering an anti-verse sentiment that is prevalent on the contemporary Tibetan literary scene. Since the flourishing of free verse form in the 1980s, thanks to the pioneering works of Dhondup Gyal, many Tibetan writers have attacked metrical composition for its perceived inflexible, archaic and inadaptable form and uniformity of content. Sangdhor, one of the most iconoclastic and forward-thinking intellectuals writing in Tibetan today, vehemently refutes such a stance on the grounds that the bulk of great Tibetan works, literary or otherwise, are set in verse. To underscore his point he writes the cited poem in a “leaping and flying” style of the mgur (‘poem-songs’) genre. In fact, most of his many innovative poems are written in an eclectic style drawing on Tibet's rich literary tradition, Buddhist texts, oral sources and contemporary writings. Their content is equally diverse yet most of all current. It is infused with social and religious criticism, themes of romance and eroticism, critical literary commentary and current Tibetan affairs. His poems, like those of many other writers, show that metered poetry is very much a part of modern Tibetan literature. As he draws on classical literature and indigenous oral traditions for his own literary innovation, to borrow a concept from Northrop Frye, in Sangdhor's work we can “see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance” that is a complication of Tibetan literary formulas stretching to the narratives of the distant past.2 Therefore, it must be borne in mind that modern Tibetan literature transcends a theory of rupture which many scholars overstress to the point of overlooking its deep, outspread roots. Some parts of these roots predate both the 1980s, which saw a flourishing of new Tibetan writing, and the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s that has had a profound impact on Tibetan cultural production.