When the duplicitous Hou Ching, the Eastern Wei satrap of Honan, declared his independence from the mother state, he invited both Western Wei and Liang to assume his allegiance and his territories. While Liang, capital at modern Nanking, eagerly accepted Hou Ching's bid, Western Wei, capital at Ch'ang-an, rejected it. But Western Wei did reluctantly allow one of its officers, the daring but personally insecure Wang Ssu-cheng, to occupy and try to hold Hou Ching's exposed city of Ch'ang-she in north-central Honan. After neatly sweeping Hou Ching and his Liang allies out of Honan, Eastern Wei turned its forces against Wang Ssu-cheng in Ch'ang-she. A long and costly siege ensued in which Wang Ssu-cheng brilliantly and doggedly fought against the overwhelmingly superior strength of Eastern Wei. Wang Ssu-cheng finally sur-rendered, not to save his own life but to save those under his command; he was honored both by his captors and by Western Wei.

The growth of China's population and die veracity of the figures that purport to measure it are both puzzles. Critical in die solutions to both puzzles are die records of an alien dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1911. All reconstructions of the growth of the population in recent centuries trace to one or the other of die two Ch'ing series—die local reports ordered by the emperor Ch'ien-lung in 1741, or the survey that began in 1909 and ended with the revolution in 1911. The results of the registration of 1953–1954 are consistent with the first Ch'ing activity. The statistics of the Republic of China had lineal descent from both series, but at a level of total population consistent with the limited results of the 1909–1911 survey.

Shinran (1173–1262), the founder of the Shinshu sect of Pure Land, was the first major Buddhist leader in Japan who openly married and produced a family. Unlike the many monks who secretly married, for Shinran marriage was a landmark on what Alfred Bloom has called “the journey to self-acceptance,” and an experience that ultimately became a central feature of the doctrine of universal salvation he preached. Although he sought above all to bridge the gulf between priest and layman and specifically disclaimed any ambition to found a new sect, let alone a religious dynasty, Shinran had nevertheless created the possibility of religious succession based on the hereditary principle.

In the last two decades of the Qing dynasty, installment publication became the dominant mode of presentation for Chinese fiction, as it had been for European and Japanese literature for more than half a century. Whether printed daily as one feature in a newspaper, weekly in literary supplements, or monthly in the fiction journals that took off in the early 1900s, Chinese vernacular fiction of this period appeared in parts over time, just as the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Jippensha Ikku, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even Henry James did (Link 1981; Lee and Nathan 1985; Chen 1988). As early as 1892, Shanghai author Han Bangqing praised the installment form for heightening suspense and forcing the reader to imagine what might happen next; by 1910 “addiction” to installment fiction could be understood as an aesthetic experience, and the popularity of the format would only increase in the decades to follow. This article seeks to trace the rise of the installment form in late Qing and early Republican China, investigate its ties with the contemporaneous cultural production of Shanghai as a metropolitan media center, and demonstrate the effects of its associated aesthetic.

As the tide of Japanese occupation recedes from the Philippines, one of the most unique experiments in modern nation building is being resumed. In a world where the aspirations of colonial peoples offer a major threat to peace and stability, what is happening in the new Commonwealth is of the greatest importance.

This paper is a preliminary study of Kim Yuka, a seventeenth-century reformer and statesman, and his role in the introduction of the tribute tax reform in the two southern provinces of Ch'ungch'ŏng and Chŏlla. It is also intended as a case study of one aspect of the actual operation of seventeenth-century Yi government. Special attention is paid to the inter-relationship between the mode of operation of the Yi government and Kim Yuk's reform efforts.

The engagement of Balinese writers and intellectuals with the modern world began well before the final incorporation of the island into the Dutch colonial state in 1906–8. This essay analyzes three Balinese texts, each belonging to a different traditional Balinese literary genre, that were written around the beginning of the twentieth century. These texts, which deal with world events and geography, are Balinese reworkings of material from printed sources into indigenous forms of textual representation. They represent some of the earliest documented shifts toward modernity by indigenous Balinese writers and embody attempts to engage with modernity as a way of both understanding the West and coming to terms with new technologies. As examples of a localized translation of the foreign and the modern, they provide insights into how elite Balinese understandings of modernity were being constituted at the turn of the century.

In this article, I juxtapose the ways the “father of modern Sinhala drama,” John De Silva, and the Sinhala language reformer, Munidasa Cumaratunga, utilized music for different nationalist projects. First, I explore how De Silva created musicals that articulated Arya-Sinhala nationalism to support the Buddhist Revival. Second, I investigate how Cumaratunga, who spearheaded the Hela-Sinhala movement, asserted that genuine Sinhala song should be rid of North Indian influence but full of lyrics composed in “pure” Sinhala. The purpose of this comparison is to critique Partha Chatterjee's notion of the inner domain. Chatterjee focused on Bengali cultural nationalism and its complex relation to Western hegemony. He considered Bengal, the metropolis of the British Raj, to be representative of colonized nations. This article reveals that elsewhere in South Asia—Sri Lanka—one cultural movement sought to define the nation not in relation to the West but in opposition to North India.