Our resources for the analysis and dissemination of information on Asia have expanded greatly since the beginning of World War II. The record reveals an astounding amount of popular and scholarly publication on almost every aspect of the continent's civilizations, with the quality rising over the decades. It is doubtful, however, that these contributions have had a meaningful impact either on public opinion or on the attitudes of those key persons who determine policy. The critical cases of China, Korea, and Indochina are the most vivid examples of recent failures in effective communication. Although in recent times no Asian country has escaped violent power struggles arising from internal or external causes, or their combined effects, in none of these conflicts has professional reporting been adequate. If readily available information and a carefully considered interpretation of that information can ameliorate conditions leading to conflict, we students of Asia, among others, cannot be proud of our achievements. The common academic response that scholarship must be disinterested and thus must bear little or no relationship to public policy is, to my mind, quite unacceptable.

In may, 1942, The Far Eastern Quarterly published an article on Outstanding books on the Far East published in 1941. This article indicated twelve books of unusual value published during that year and gave comments on many others which for one reason or another seemed worthy of notice. Since Pearl Harbor, American interest in Asia and the Pacific has greatly increased and American publications about the Far East have become much more numerous. However, increase in quantity has not necessarily meant increase in quality. Many of those who might normally have produced reliable popular works or thorough research studies have been called on to do special war work and have had little time or opportunity for writing, while pseudo-experts and eye-witnesses without real background have burst into print. The layman who wishes to learn about Eastern Asia, as every American should and must, sorely needs a touchstone with which to tell gold from dross in the pile of recent publications on the Far East which confronts him. The editors of The Far Eastern Quarterly have therefore felt that an attempt to select the outstanding books published since the beginning of 1942 is decidedly in order.

These papers throw a great deal of light upon the history of biography. There are a number of striking similarities between Chinese biography and that which developed in the Western world. These similarities, at least until recent times, do not seem to have resulted from any influence of one form upon the other, and thus they serve to illuminate the nature of the form itself. First of all, although the traditional Chinese view of the relation of the individual to society seems to have been quite different from that common in the West, the earliest motives in writing biography were essentially the same. Eulogy, for example—what Nivison calls the “paying of final respect to the dead”—seems to be a universal motive for writing biography. So also does the desire to use the life of a person to teach a lesson—the didactic motive which all three of these papers refer to and which dominated Western biography for centuries. The idea mentioned by Nivison of burying a brief biography along with departed worthies has its parallel in the tomb inscriptions of the Egyptian pharaohs.

Compared with the other countries of Southeast Asia, the Western-language historiography of Thailand is meagre indeed. Western sources have furthered scholarship considerably, but historical writing on Thailand will remain unbalanced until Thai materials have been fully exploited. Some beginning has been made on this work by both Thai and Western scholars, but as yet this is only a beginning.

Chinese studies (alias Sinology) and die disciplines came, in the final analysis, from the same parentage: the desire to know. They are intellectual twins which, nurtured in divergent circumstances and showing dissimilar traits, are thus “fraternal” rather than “identical”. Academe has always been nursery and playground for the disciplines. In the early days, those who served as Sinology's amahs were mostly non-academic people. Uncommitted to die established disciplines and frankly amateurish in approach, they all but bastardized Sinology in the eyes of the more strait-laced among the governesses of the disciplines. For a time, some of the latter were hardly aware of the underprivileged twin's existence.

The immediate purpose of this study is to describe an interesting and rather bizarre episode in nineteenth century Chinese-British relations. It concerns the so-called “Canton City Question” of the 1840's, and I hope to show that the traditional accounts of this incident may have been misleading and, in some cases, inaccurate.

Education on western lines began in India by the middle of the nineteenth century with the establishment of a few high schools and colleges in the larger cities of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Poona. The three oldest universities in India, those at the “Presidency” capitals of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay were incorporated in 1858 and the first graduates in arts and law came out soon thereafter. Normally most of the arts graduates entered the middle ranks of the administrative services and received, according to the standards of the times, relatively attractive remuneration. Also, they were greatly respected in the middle class society of those days. The law graduates also did well as advocates and lower grade judges, and a few even won such coveted posts as seats on the benches of the High Courts.

Editor's Note

The following five papers, presented as a panel on March 22,1964, at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington, D. C., are reproduced here at slightly greater length than in their original versions. The panel was organized by G. W. Skinner with the prior understanding that these somewhat longer versions would be prepared for publication in the Journal. The papers were, however, written independently of one another and have not been modified as a result of the discussion. It is clear that several of them use the term Sinology somewhat differently, but that in balance there is more agreement among the authors than might ideally have been planned in order to stimulate the kind of discussion and exchange which a panel implies. There was, however, vigorous discussion from the floor, of which the comments by Benjamin Schwartz, printed immediately following the papers in this issue, are a sample. We will publish in the November issue comments from two others, who will be able to base their remarks on the present printed papers. Others who may wish to send in comments for publication are invited to address them to the Editor.