In February 1276, the Southern Sung capital Lin-an (modern Hang-chou) fell to the Mongols, and the last Sung emperor, Chao Hsien (Kung-ti ), was taken captive. With the aid of its loyal ministers, the remaining members of the royal house fled to the south. In June the nine-year-old Chao Cheng was enthroned in Foochow as emperor (Tuan-tsung ). However, with high officials in Fukien defecting one after the other to the Mongols, the royal house was forced before long to retreat by sea further south to Kwangtung. In March 1277 the Sung stronghold at Canton also fell and the imperial family hastily fled to Mei-wei , in the vicinity of the present-day Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong. In November, under the mounting pressure of the Mongols, they retreated south-west along the Kwangtung coast. Since Chao Hsien was never likely to resume control and there seemed to be some chance of taking refuge in the vassal kingdoms of Champa and An-nam (in present-day Vietnam), there followed a flurry of Chinese emigration. The tragedy of the last Sung emperor has evoked much sympathy in history, but the story of the migration and search for refuge of some Sung officials has not been fully explored. This paper attempts to give a descriptive account and present a brief analysis of the background factors which shaped the course of migration, as well as its impact on the increased Chinese cultural influence in Vietnam.

The American involvement in Viet Nam has not unnaturally led to the assumption that Chinese expansionism has had a long history of activity in that region, and not a few American writers, notably of journalistic fiber, have come out openly to say that it is really the Chinese that the American forces are fighting against, citing at the same time, hundreds of, even a thousand, years in which Viet Nam was under the control of the Chinese, and innumerable occasions on which it was invaded by the Chinese, that Chinese aggression, on the basis of encroachments into Viet Nam, is a proven fact, and unarguable. On the other hand, there have been a few, notably scholars, who have contended otherwise, that, although imperialism may have infected certain Chinese dynasties, the dominant characteristic, indeed, in the territorial expansion of the Chinese has been their willingness to accept any “barbarian” outsider who would but learn Chinese and accept Chinese customs, as Chinese; also, that China itself is composed of people who are descended from “barbarians” absorbed into the Chinese state by the acculturation process; that the Chinese, while indeed invading their peripheral states on frequent occasions, have done so almost without exception on provocations, such as coups, or attempted coups of the existing friendly-to-China dynasties, and so forth.

On July 23, 1962, the International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian Question in Geneva came to a close with the formal signature of a Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos and a Protocol to the Declaration. The Conference had been in session for over a year; fourteen governments participated, and all of them became parties to the agreements reached.

The romantic Filipino revolutionary and “irreconcilable” Artemio Ricarte y Vibora was born in 1866 at Batac, Ilocos Norte. A teacher of Spanish in Cavite by profession but a soldier by inclination, Ricarte secretly joined the independence-minded “blood brother-hood,” the Katipunan. Subsequently, he became an officer in the anti-Spanish Philippine uprising of 1896–1897. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Ricarte was one of those recruited by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo to cooperate with the Americans in destroying Spain's authority in the Philippines. As the commander of a military district in Luzon, Ricarte was rewarded by the revolutionary government with the title of General. As early as December of 1898, Ricarte doubted that the Americans would willingly withdraw from the Islands, and he submitted to Aguinaldo a plan for an immediate uprising against the American troops in Manila. Though this plot was frustrated, the outbreak of fighting on February 4, 1899, which resulted in the bloody Philippine-American War, occurred in an area immediately adjacent to that controlled by Ricarte, and some observers believe that Ricarte's personal belligerence contributed significantly to the edginess of the Filipino soldiers.

It is not infrequent for some Filipino historians to write that the Filipino people have inherited a, great deal from both Oriental and Occidental cultures without losing their racial identity, and that before the coming of Spain and Christianity to the Philippines during the sixteenth century, the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos had commercial, political, and cultural relations with India, China, Japan, and the rest of Malaysia. This view, however, requires certain clarifications and qualifications. The term “Filipino” now-a-days is mainly a political one and generally denotes the native inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago who are subject to a definite and internationally recognized central government. Seventy years or more ago, the native inhabitants of the Philippines were called “indios” and not “Filipinos”, as this latter term was reserved for Spaniards who were born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from those Spaniards who were born in Spain. Historically speaking, in spite of the fact that the present-day Filipinos and their ancestors belong to a wider race, they did not constitute a “people” in any political sense. This is not to deny that their ancestors shared in a common cultural matrix. But if they were a “people” in this sense, then they, with the present-day Indonesians and other Malays, belong to one people. As pointed earlier, the concept of a Filipino people belonging to one national community is a recent one, and the process of integrating them more and more into a national community is still going on. It might be meaningful to maintain that the different Malay peoples at present are segmented or divided into different political entities.

On his mother's side, W. Cameron Forbes was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on his father's, the grandson of John Murray Forbes, who made his fortune in the China clipper trade. He carried in his heredity the shrewd business ability of the one and the liberalism of the other. In Hofstadter's turn of phrase, he was the patrician as liberal. His wealth, his education — the best available (Milton Academy, Hopkinson School, Harvard) — would have entitled him to admittance to the innermost recesses of post-Civil War Republicanism. Yet he remained at best only affiliated with that party, and at heart an outspoken Independent. In 1892, on graduation from Harvard, he joined Stone and Webster, later gained experience in business as officer and director of several Boston banks, and then, just before the turn of the century, joined the family firm of J. M. Forbes and Co., Merchants.

This paper examines three aspects of the Opium trade in Szechwan from 1881, when for the first time there is evidence that China consumed as much native as foreign opium and that Szechwan was both the largest producer and consumer, until 1911, when the cultivation of the poppy was completely suppressed in the province as a result of the vigorous imperial campaign against the trade. It will consider first, the demand for opium who smoked it and why; second, the production of opium, how it fitted into and contributed toward the economy of the province; finally, the character of the suppression campaign of 1906–1911 as it affected Szechwan will be considered. The conclusions of the paper may be summarised as follows. (1) While the expansion of the opium habit in Szechwan, as in the rest of China, had no one cause, in Szechwan it has for its background a prospering society whose values and accepted goals had not kept pace with its economic expansion, a society which provided increasing wealth and leisure on the one hand, but only limited opportunities for socially approved spending on the other. (2) The rapid expansion of opium production in late nineteenth century Szechwan was part of the development of a market economy both within the province and in its relations with the rest of China. (3) The opium suppression campaign, because it undermined a developing economy, was much less popular in Western China than it was in the east, and contributed to the widespread unrest in those parts, which in turn led to the revolution of 1911.

Urbanization and bureaucratization are usually connected with a high rate of social mobility in western industrialized societies. In Thailand, however, mobility has declined at least between certain strata of Thai society following the consolidation of a bureaucratic elite in the expanding urban centre of Bangkok. The growing size, the monopolization of certain status symbols, the development of a distinct subculture and the concentration of economic and political power are indications that the bureaucratic elite is developing into a social class. It is therefore concluded that urbanization and bureaucratization in formerly loosely structured societies may lead to the formation of a class system and to a temporary decline of social mobility.