¹ As a guide as to what one might reasonably expect in this direction, I may mention that cadets of the Malayan and Hong Kong Civil Services were given two and a half years in which to acquire a knowledge of a single dialect of Chinese and of the written character and had no other task to perform during their two years residence in China. Chinese specialists of the Dutch Civil Service in Indonesia spent seven years from the commencement of their studies at Leiden University learning Chinese before they were let loose on to the Chinese of Indonesia.