Brian Houghton Hodgson lived and worked at the British Residency in Kathmandu from1820 to 1843, and served as British Resident in Nepal for the last ten of these years.1 Hedied in 1894, and some 25 years after his death Perceval Landon wrote:

Some time ago my attention was arrested by the remark of Mr. Cecil Bendall who, writing in 1886, while Hodgson was still alive, referred to him as ‘the greatest, and least thanked of all our English Residents’. It is difficult to dispute either adjective. Hodgson was indeed more than the greatest ofEnglish Residents. He was the founder of all our real knowledge of Buddhism. He was the only manwhose infinite variety of scholarship and interest could, unaided, have written the true history of Nepal.

In Ethiopia the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth were of crucial importance. This period witnessed the rise of King, after 1889 Emperor, Menilek, founder of the modern Ethiopian state. He it was who established the presentcapital, Addis Ababa, in 1886–7, defeated an Italian colonial army at the battle of Adwain 1896, and between 1905 and 1910 established a number of modern institutions, including the first modern bank, school, hospital, roads and railway. A notable innovator, he was well content to utilise the skills of Indians, as well as other foreigners, for themodernisation of his age-old empire.

In Mandaeism, to copy a manuscript is a meritorious act — a Mandaean copyist (usually a priest) may undertake the task as an exercise to remit his own sins, and those of his family — or he may be hired to perform the task for someone else. Almost all Mandaean manuscripts contain colophons; excluded are talismans and other short magical texts. In the case where the transmission of a Mandaean text spans, say, fifteen or sixteen centuries, a colophon may be very long. Copying the Mandaean Ginza is a major piece of work, for it is the most voluminous of all known Mandaean texts. Mark Lidzbarski's Ginza edition and translation did not include the colophons, the lists of scribes that are attached to the text.

Few Islamic teachings can boast the fame, if not the notoriety, enjoyed by the doctrine of “unity of existence”, also known as “unity of being” (waḥdat al-wujūd). This controversialphilosophical doctrine became intimately associated with the towering figure of the Arabmystic of al-Andalus, Muḥyī'l-Dīn Ibn 'Arabī (d. 638/1240). Although Ibn 'Arabī himselfdoes not seem to have applied this ambiguous term to his loosely structured meta physical speculations, it gained wide currency among his followers starting from the celebrated Anatolian thinker Ṣadr al-Dīh al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274).

The Western science and technology which invaded China during the mid-nineteenthcentury, in the wake of European military and economic aggression, entered a culture witha long indigenous tradition of natural philosophy, formed by extraordinary figures suchas Zhang Heng (78–139), Sun Simiao (581–682), Ge Hong (c. 21–341), Shen Gua (1031–1095) and Song Yingxing (c. 1587–1665). Moreover, as modern research has shown, China was, at least until about A.D. 1400, moreadvanced scientifically and technologically than Western Europe in many respects. Thesmall minority of late Qing scholars who showed any interest in the natural world or intechnology could console themselves that they were working within a noble but neglected side-stream of Chinese culture.

The Royal Asiatic Society has recently been a beneficiary from the estate of Mrs Dorothy Wales, widow of H. G. Quaritch Wales, the erudite scholar of early Southeast Asian history who died in 1981. The occasion of this bequest, the contents of which are discussed in the Librarian's report herein (pp. 169–70), prompts this note on the contribution of Quaritch Wales to Southeast Asian studies.

Quaritch Wales was born in 1900 and educated at Charterhouse and Queens' College, Cambridge. He immediately embarked on a career in Southeast Asia, from which he was never to be deflected. At the age of 23 he entered the service of the Siamese Government where he served from 1924 to 1928 as an adviser to the courts of King Rama VI and King Rama VII. The first-hand knowledge gained from this experience formed the basis of his pioneering study Siamese State Ceremonies (1931), which remains a work of unrivalled insight into the Brahmanical rituals and Buddhist accretions of Thai kingship. He followed this with another work based on his experiences of Thai court and state functions, Ancient Siamese Government and Administration (1934).