Chinese conduct books for women were read throughout East Asia, but because Chinese was considered too difficult for women in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, vernacular editions often were prepared in order to make the message more accessible. In this article we present a bibliographic study of surviving conduct books for Vietnamese women, both in Chinese and in Vietnamese, and in manuscript and printed forms, and consider the production of such texts in the light of conduct literature for women produced in Korea and Japan. A particularly interesting case is Lesser learning for women, a hybrid book combining a Ming-dynasty didactic text in Chinese with other didactic materials in Vietnamese. For the most part, these various conduct books for women purvey unchanging moral certainties and restrictions for women, and as such were increasingly at odds with the changing world of colonial Vietnam in which educational opportunities for women were growing.

This article examines the triangular relationship among the Chinese community of northern Vietnam, the North Vietnamese government, and China, focusing in particular on how the relationship affected the ethnic and national identities of Chinese residents in North Vietnam between 1954 and 1978. Scrutiny of the two important issues of citizenship and the Chinese school system reveals that North Vietnamese leaders adopted lenient policies toward Chinese residents mainly because they saw the relationship between the Vietnamese state and the Chinese community as part and parcel of North Vietnam's relationship with China. These policies ultimately contributed to a delay in the assimilation of Chinese residents, and by the end of the 1970s they still had not completed the transformation from well-treated sojourners into citizens of Vietnam. Though many Chinese residents embraced a status of privileged outsider, others willingly participated on Vietnam's behalf in the war against America. After reunification, the desire to clarify loyalty, i.e. to “purify” the nation-state, led the Vietnamese government to initiate an aggressive process of forced assimilation. This policy, and the deterioration of relations between Vietnam and China in the late 1970s, triggered an exodus of Chinese residents.

This paper investigates perceptions of courtesans, gender and power from various perspectives, using both literary and non-literary sources and reconstructed lost books. Analysis focuses on representations of the celebrated courtesan, poet and painter Xue Susu (fl. 1575–before 1652) by writers of different backgrounds, gender and class. In late Ming times women participated in elite culture in unprecedented numbers. Courtesans gained prominence in the literati arts, playing a formative role in shaping cultural ideals. Late imperial Chinese discourse embeds the image of the courtesan in the formation of new beauty ideals and social negotiations of gender roles and power. Paradoxes abound, linking the courtesan with notions of chivalry, chastity and loyalism and depicting her in the context of national politics and warfare. The Ming/Qing texts reflect not only current perceptions of women and courtesans, but also the social and cultural aspirations, dreams, anxieties and desires of their authors.

In Sri Lanka elephants are endangered and ivory carving, as an art, is dead. Sri Lanka was once famous for the number and quality of its elephants, whose tusks were carved and exported since ancient times. Although Sri Lanka became, successively, a pivotal outpost for the Portuguese, Dutch and English, details about the Ceylonese ivory trade appear in trade documents only rarely. And yet, if information is not to be found there, does that mean ivory trade did not occur? Trade documents, after all, do not tell the whole story. Smugglers, illegal traders, big game hunters and plantation owners all played a part in the disappearance of elephants and its corollary, the ivory trade. When archival evidence is viewed in combination with physical evidence and the anecdotes of visitors and residents, it becomes evident that ivory remained an integral part of trade and crafts in Ceylon well into the last century.

The aim of this brief survey is to provide a critical review of studies of China's economic history recently published by prominent Western scholars. It will explore two veins of scholarly debates that underlie Western perceptions of both China's past and its trajectory of future development, and also consider the historic significance of joint-stock enterprise in China as opposed to Britain and Japan.

In the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Choseon court issued currency in the form of paper money and enacted a prohibition of the long-standing custom among the populace of using commodity currencies. Because commodity currencies were restricted by the value of the materials from which they were made, and because the amount in circulation was determined by what was produced by the populace, they did not conform to the financial concept of “royal prerogative” (ikkwon jaesang) – the state control of the production and distribution of resources. From the middle of the fifteenth century, however, there was a loosening of the prohibition against commodity currencies, a change of policy entailing the recognition of material currency as long as it conformed to certain standards. Thereafter, even transactions involving substandard materials gradually came to be tacitly recognized. During the sixteenth century, inferior cloth whose weave was only three-fifths of the standard became the general accepted level of quality for currency among the populace. Other transformations, such the tacit recognition of regional markets in times of poor harvest, and the alignment of periods of substitute payments of tribute and substitute military service, demonstrate that the rigid financial oversight of the early Choseon court, dependent as it was upon the collection of tribute in kind and military and other labour services, had to accede to the demands of the populace for sufficient liquidity.

It is well known that the nations of Europe and North America take the lead in the majority of disciplines in the academic world today. In most fields, unless a scholarly work makes reference in some way or other to the findings of Euro-American research, it is not considered worthy of mention. It is not, however, so common for the accomplishments of Euro-American scholars to be taken up by Japanese and Chinese scholars working in the field of ancient Chinese history. Presumably one reason for this is that in East Asia, especially in Japan and China, there are long and rich traditions of scholarship on Chinese ancient history that reach back to premodern times. Yet to just what extent is the research of European and American scholars referenced in the introductory books and general surveys concerning ancient Chinese history that are published in Japan and China?