There is a Malay saying, ‘From the endless past to the endless future,’ and most of us will have our own memories of a timeless Asia: a shepherd boy calling to his flock, grain winnowed in the wind, women drawing water at the well, fishing craft returning on the evening tide, the boom of the temple gong. This is the ‘Unchanging East’ which provides the principal Western stereotype of Asia.

‘It is one thing to divide a country on a map’, writes Lieutenant-General Duong Van Minh, Commander-in-Chief and destroyer of the late President Ngo Dinh Diem (and Head of State for a time in succession to him), ‘but it is not so easy to divide a people—to sever bonds of family, culture, and history. The Vietnamese people are one; they cannot be separated into northerners or southerners’.

The years 1916–17 were something of a turning-point in the development of Vietnamese nationalism. In Cochinchina an abortive attack on Saigon central prison in February 1916 was followed by a great many arrests and the virtual destruction, for the time being, of the network of secret societies which had grown up in many of the colony's provinces during the previous decade. Many members of such societies were brought before special military tribunals (justified by the fact that France was at war in Europe) and sentenced to death, exile, or long terms of imprisonment. In Annam another abortive plot, probably quite separate, was hatched at Huê in May 1916, involving the kidnapping of the boy-emperor Duy-Tân; but he was found by the French two years later, before a projected rising in the provinces of Quang-Nam and Quang-Ngai could get under way. The leader of the plot, Trân Cao Vân, was executed along with three others, and the deposed emperor was exiled to the island of Réunion.2 These events in Cochinchina and Annam brought to a halt, for a time at least, the activities of secret nationalist groups which, drawing their initial inspiration from Japan, had been increasing in strength since about 1905. In Tongking there were also secret associations, mostly acknowledging the leadership of Phan Bôi Châu who was then in exile at Canton, and strongly influenced by the revolutionary methods of Sun Yat-sen. But there also, their last important operation for several years occurred in September 1917, when Luong Ngoc Quyên escaped from prison at Thai-Nguyen and was able to control the town for a week, before being driven out and committing suicide.3 Phan Bôi Châu himself was arrested by the Chinese the following year.

This review of one hundred years of Education in Ceylon recounts the progress of Education in the island since 1869, when the Department of Public Instruction (which later became the Department of Education) was first created 73 years after Britain's first firm entry into Ceylon.