The dormant political atmosphere, so long characteristic of the colonial society of the Indies, was undergoing an almost imperceptible change at the dawn of the twentieth century. Apart from the official adoption of the “Ethical Policy”—the moral assumption by the Netherlands of a concern for “native” welfare—ripples indicative of a new consciousness were occurring within the indigenous society. A movement for female education and emancipation was instigated by Raden Adjeng Kartini, daughter of the Regent of Djapara. A socio-cultural organization of Javanese intellectuals named Boedi Oetomo (Splendid Endeavor) was founded in May 1908. The Sarekat Islam (United Islam), initially concerned with economic matters, had by 1912 begun to stress religious principles and was soon to gain a mass following under Hadji O. S. Tjokroaminoto. The Eurasian E. F. E. Douwes Dekker, through agitation and the establishment of a real independence party, the Indische Partij (Party of the Indies), was the first to make a major contribution in the field of political nationalism.

Two years ago our revered elder statesman Kenneth Scott Latourette gave us a comprehensive review of the development during the last few decades of studies in the United States of the Sinic world. In a sense I wish to follow in his footsteps, on the one hand broadening the base to include studies by people of all nationalities, and on the other narrowing it or restricting it to cover only one branch of the many fields of learning represented by our membership. For good reasons too I limit the discussion to China alone. Not that important discoveries have not been made elsewhere, from the Indus River to the island of Hokkaido and from Siberia to the Maldive Islands, many of them bearing importantly on the growth of civilization amongst the Chinese people; a Han crossbow lock in Taxila, T'ang cash at Anuradhapura, a rock-cut representation of a Sung junk at Angkor, a late Han bronze at Oc-Eo, pre-Han silk in the frozen graves of the Altai, Ch'i state coins of the third century B.C. in northern Korea, and tenth-century block printing in the bosom of the lovely Buddhist statue which Chōnen brought back to Japan from Pien-liang in the year 985. All these and many more were discoveries of recent years in the regions now included in the Association for Asian Studies. One might, if desired, construct a much wider horizon, and so take in the Han dynasty hu or vase found in Dane John at Canterbury and now a prized possession of the British Museum, or Sung to Ming porcelain turned up at Fostat and the Kilwa Islands off the coast of Tanganyika, and the items of presumed Chinese inspiration discovered on the west coast of Central America and in Peru. But this would take us far afield, interesting though the subject may be. They show us how mobile the early Chinese were, or, if not the people themselves, certainly the work of their fingers, and how valued it was, giving tongue to the comment of Abū Zayd Ḥasan (ca. 916): “Amongst all the creatures of Allah, the Chinese have the cleverest hands at designing and creating things: for the execution of all manner of works there is no people in the world who can do better than they.”

Lokamanya Tilak (1856–1920) represents the full tide of ideological activity in the Indian Nationalist movement. Long overshadowed by his younger contemporary, Gandhi, his life and thought are only now, a third of a century after his death, receiving due recognition.

Prior to his entrance upon the political stage, Indian leadership afforded the spectacle of a rather polite debating society which accepted British ideals and values as almost axiomatic. Protests against government policies consisted of thoughtfully worded petitions calculated to appeal to the sense of reason and fair play of officials. Tilak saw little profit in such method, but his rivals in the Nationalist leadership, particularly G. K. Gokhale, were wedded to the traditions of British parliamentary procedure.

Historians of the modern Far East have usually assumed that in spite of the founding of the Tsungli-yamen and the launching of the self-strengthening movement of the 1860's, Chinese foreign policy remained weak, inept, and uninformed. Typically, China's handling of the Korean problem is contrasted with the swift and sure diplomacy of the new Japan to show how little Chinese statesmen understood of changing world conditions or of the altered character of the threat from Japan. China's failure to prevent Korea from slipping out of the tributary system is held to offer such obvious proof of the inadaptability of Ch'ing diplomacy as to make the issue scarcely worth discussing.

The data of village and farm business surveys in India are too inaccurate to be of use in the analysis of the rural economy or the changes therein. This unsatisfactory nature of the data stems from the difference in outlook and interests of the cultivator and the investigator, the problem of memory, the problem of indifference in a context of hierarchical loyalties and conflicts, and the problem of motivation toward accurate replies on the part of the respondent when he has many reasons to mislead in many directions and few, if any, reasons to be conscientiously helpful. Some data, those which can be gathered by counting or by limited observation, are usable, but the gathering of quantitative data on farm operations will require a great effort over an extended period of time on a village at a time. Otherwise, the foreign scholar or visiting expert must restrict himself to employing the small amount of the bench-mark data as a base from which to work in constructing a description of the structure of aspects of the rural economy without hope of being able to employ quantitative methods on any but the most limited scale.

Since the Second World War transitions from colonial to sovereign status have become so frequent as to be almost commonplace. The royal family in England has had an extra chore added to its duties in inaugurating new constitutions. Britain, which was thought by many before the war to be regulating the speed of inevitable gradualness by that of the tortoise, or even the glacier rather than the hare, has in recent years been sometimes accused of headlong haste and even Gadarene precipitation. Some of this proper speed or improper haste has been the result of lessons hardly learnt. Since there is much ground to be covered before the last colonial regime passes into independence, or some newly enfranchised states achieve stability, it is worth examining more closely the experience of one colonial region, for which purpose I propose to consider India.

En chine, depuis les seconds Han (25–220 A.D.), en Corée, depuis le VIe siècle, au Japon, depuis Shōtoku (593), le Bouddhisme est partout: doctrines, systèmes croyances, institutions politiques, architecture, sculpture, peinture, sur tous les domaines il est un facteur capital; sans lui, rien ne s'explique; autour de lui, tout s'éclaire et s'ordonne.”—Sylvain Lévi.

Eleutheromania is defined by one lexicographer as “a frantic zeal for freedom.” This frantic zeal for casting off former linguistic shackles (or what seemed to be shackles) has led to some problems that are worth examining here.

Before launching into an analysis of Indonesian problems I might recall similar and probably more familiar situations of the past hundred years in Europe and Asia. The newly unified states of Germany and Italy suffered some of the same growing pains during their consolidation, but linguistically their situations were widely different. The Trecento in Italy left a language that has been able to resist encroachment gently yet firmly enough to forestall both xenomania and xenophobia. German has had both Luther and Goethe as great unifying literary forces, but Gallomania and Gallophobia have alternated to provide sociolinguistic attitudes comparable in a remote way with those besetting the Indonesians, Malays, Indians, and Pakistanis.

The post-Stalinist interest shown by the Soviet Union in the non-aligned nations of Southern Asia has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the quantity and quality of material dealing with this area appearing in leading Soviet scholarly journals. Though there has been the usual spate of propagandistic articles lauding the growing evidences of expanding cultural, economic, and political relations between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and India, Afghanistan, Burma, and Indonesia on the other, it would be a mistake to dismiss all such Soviet endeavors as unworthy of serious attention. Much of the material reflects a diligent effort by Soviet orientalists to analyze the past and the present of the nations of Southern Asia with a view toward making up for the previous period of flagrant neglect.

There are several reasons why the legal institution of dien . (generally, but, as will be shown, erroneously rendered in English as “mortgage”) should be of interest to the student of Chinese and Vietnamese law. First of all, it merits attention on account of its very wide use, a fact which has been recognized by its incorporation, in a modified form, into the Chinese Civil Code. Then again it affords a striking example of an attempt by the Chinese government in Imperial times to develop by legislation the scope and purpose of an institution of private customary law, and of the way in which customary law asserted its vitality in face of the legislator by surviving unchanged into modern times. And lastly it illustrates, by the erroneous interpretations that for 150 years have been put upon it by European lawyers, the pitfalls that lie in the way of anyone who tries to explain Far Eastern legal concepts in European terms.

In the six-year period from 1950 to 1956 a considerable number of books articles, and pamphlets on Korea were published in the Soviet Union. Although some of these items were noted in the Library of Congress bibliography of Russian language works in August 1950, and although a few have been mentioned in subsequent surveys of Soviet publications on the Far East, there has been no recent attempt to describe and assess in general terms the total Soviet output on the subject of Korea since the North Korean Communist invasion brought war and world attention to the peninsula. Such a general survey is the main objective of the present study. A secondary aim is to present a tentative report on the present state of Korean studies in the Soviet Union. The present survey is by no means all inclusive; Soviet newspapers are not discussed; some items known to exist have not been available for inspection; others unknown undoubtedly lie buried in the voluminous pages of Soviet periodical literature. Nevertheless it is believed that the scrutinized sample of Soviet writings on Korea has been adequate for the presentation of an accurate general picture.

Yüan opera, if we limit our material to the one hundred examples found in the Yüan-ch'ü hsüan (YCH), seems to be a well defined genre, the numerous formal peculiarities of which can be shown to have evolved from earlier entertainment forms in a manner truly comforting to the literary historian. Analyzed, Yiian drama shows a highly consistent structure with the following features:

1. Four “acts” with the option of a demi-act, “wedge,” which can appear between any two acts, or at the beginning of the tsa-chü (Yüan opera).

2. Within each act all arias were sung to tunes of the same mode.

Everyone with interests in Chinese studies who has had occasion to become aware of it will agree that within the past two or three years there has been a marked upswing in the quantity and in the quality of publication in Taiwan. The present writer observed some of this new development on the scene in 1954–55, and others both better informed and better qualified to judge report that the trend continues. Although the Journal has on several occasions during the last five or six years reported briefly on publication there, now there is perhaps some value in reporting more comprehensively on recent developments, both because the phenomenon itself is of interest, and because many recently published items will be desired by scholars and by research libraries.