This paper examines the role that veterans played in the construction of historical memory narratives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. I argue that veterans, who had long established a ‘language community’ with a particular way to speak about the war, found it difficult to communicate with post-war audiences that did not share that experience. The paper analyses six categories of ‘memory writing’ that veterans used to engage with memory debates: post-war diaries, ‘testimonial literature’, articles and literary works, surveys and oral histories, memoirs, and paratext. This study thus proposes that veterans do not avoid discussion of war, but can only be ‘heard’ by members of their language community, or by a post-war society that is prepared to ‘listen’ to their message with little mediation. This is a direct consequence of their experience of the war, and how they crafted their language community at that time.

In many religious traditions, those who mediate relations between men and gods are often the focus of controversy and moral ambiguity. The ethnography in this paper outlines a number of perspectives on the role of such intermediaries (here ‘saints’) in Muslim society in western India. In the South Asian literature, historians have provided a thorough treatment of the doctrinal history and content of these debates. However, very little attention has been paid to how living individuals interpret and rehearse these debates in practice. The examination of the changing perspectives of three Muslim men on the question of saint worship over a 10 year period reveals the following. First, an individual's relationship with ‘saints’ is often determined primarily by social context rather than simply by doctrinal allegiance or the compulsions of particular ‘beliefs’. Second, discourses of religious reform are also powerful social objects that can be used as political instruments for purposes other than simply refining the religious practices of a community. Finally, many commonplace assumptions in the literature—notably on the nature of belief and the significance of doctrinal divisions among Muslims—do not withstand ethnographic scrutiny.

Until 1971, when Alexander Woodside published his ground- breaking study, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, western scholarship on late traditional Vietnam was still locked within the narrow confines of French colonial understanding. Woodside's work, which drew extensively on Vietnamese historical sources, became an instant classic. So thoroughly did it dominate the field that two decades later it remains today the sole detailed discussion in English of the first half of the nineteenth century. Such is its stature that no-one has ever seriously questioned its findings, or challenged the author's vision of early nineteenth-century Vietnam. However, such a critique is long overdue. Despite the breadth of Woodside's scholarship, his conceptual framework assumes a continuity in Vietnamese history, culture, and politics from the Le to the early Nguyen that distorts the historical dynamic of the nineteenth cen tury, as well as contradicting some of his own evidence. His image of the nineteenth-century political elite provides a case in point. Like every scholar before or since, Woodside's conclusions about elite composition are extrapolated from the Sinic structures of its mandarinal organization, buttressed by anecdotal evidence and generalized impressions. But these are poor substitutes for quantification when enough readily-available biographical data exist to profile elite composition statistically. This article presents such an analysis. Its results contradict venerable French colonial views and Woodside's ideas alike; and do so in a way that suggests our present historical understanding of the late pre-colonial Vietnam needs serious revision.

One of the functions of any imperial system is to stabilize the subordinate political structures over which it exercises suzerainty. Without such a role for the central authority, control of local politics becomes impossible and, without such centralization, the stability of the entire empire is threatened. This policy has often acted to support or maintain local socio-economic relationships which, in the absence of overarching centralization, would show greater instability and flux. The precise nature of these relations can best be seen in an examination of the interregnum period between the decline of one imperial power and the imposition of a new generation of centralized stability.

En prenant son service, le 25 janvier 1520, à bord du Santa Maria do Monte, dans le port de Goa, l'escrivão de cette nau portugaise, Cristóvāo Afonso, était porteur d'un registre de cent pages. Conservé aujourd'hui à l'Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, à Lisbonne, sous la cote Núcleo Antigo 609, ce Lyvro da receyta e despesa da nao Santa Maria do Monte em que vay por capitam e feytor Paris Corbinell pera Ormuz com arroz delRey nosso senhor pera s'entregar ao feytor e oficiaes da feytoria no dito Ormuz nous est parvenu dans un état incomplet. Le texte ne comporte que 27 feuilles écrites, avec la numérotation originale de I à 8, 11 à 16, 24 à 27, 36 à 42, 50 et 51. La perte est loin d'être aussi importante qu'il semblerait. II restait toujours dans les ‘cahiers’ (cadernos) de cette sorte un bon nombre de pages blanches. La comparaison entre les títulos du sommaire établi par l'écrivain au feuillet Iv et l'état présent du manuscrit permet de constater que manque seulement la liste de ce que le capitaine avait reçu au magasin d'Ormuz pour le voyage de retour (fol. 60: ‘As cousas que recebeo o capitam no almazem per'a nao te Goa’), que nous pouvons d'ailleurs connaître en partie par divers items d'autres títulos. Tout à la fin du cahier avaient été transcrits deux alvarás, fol. 97 ‘Alvara da demasya da carga’, et fol. 99 ‘O alvara da capitania de Paris Corbynell’.

The late nineteenth century was a period of selective institution-building by the British in India. Government's efforts were directed primarily towards the development of a more effective control and communications infrastructure. The initial impetus for such changes in Bengal came during the energetic administration of Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant Governor from 1871 to 1874. Under his auspices, attempts were made to extend the administrative machinery down to the sub-district levels by the creation of sub-deputy collectorships and the revitalization of such local officials as kanungos (registrars), patwaris (village accountants) and chaukidars (village watchmen). Better connections to local society were also sought through institutions which linked government to its allies, such as municipal, local, and district boards, and the Court of Wards.

One of the most intriguing questions in the modern history of North India is why the Muslims of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh, and referred to hereafter as U.P.; see Map 1) supported the demand for Pakistan when it was obvious that if they were successful they would have either to remain in a Hindu dominated India, or suffer the upheaval of migration. In recent years Paul Brass and Francis Robinson have debated the general question of Muslim separatism in U.P., taking positions which Brass has described, respectively, as ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘primordialist’. Brass argues that the Muslims were modernizing at a faster rate than Hindus, that they had a larger share of government jobs than their fourteen percent of the population would warrant, that Muslim politicians erected a myth of ‘the backward Muslim’ to protect this privilege, and then selected communally divisive symbols to mobilize support for their own drive to power. In short, the ‘instrumentalist’ position argues the autonomy of the ‘game of symbol selection’ on the part of the politicians, and therefore of the significance of symbol response on the part of those who supported the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan. Robinson, on the other hand, first disagrees that the backwardness of the Muslims was a myth, especially relative to the role they perceived they had played in U.P. society for many centuries, and secondly, he seeks to demonstrate that the religious and cultural assumptions of the Muslim political leaders shaped and directed their actions.

S. J. Tambiah has drawn attention to two recent developments in Thai Buddhism which strike him as having a particularly seminal significance. The first is ‘the new politico-economic role of monks themselves as promoters of government-sponsored community development programmes’. The characteristics of this aspect of Thai Buddhism have been charted into the early seventies at least, by Tambiah, Suksamran and Ruth-Inge Heinze.

This paper discusses some of the initial findings arising from research into the electoral system of the United Provinces in the period before Independence, that is, from about 1935 until 1947. I have chosen to give particular attention to the activities of political parties in the 1937 and 1946 elections to the lower house (or Legislative Assembly) of the provincial legislature.

During the twenty years after the First World War, Indian politics were moulded by two main forces, each of which drew strength from the other. Important constitutional changes devolved a range of powers to Indians. But the British did not plan these reforms of 1919 and 1935 as stages by which they would quit India, bag and baggage, but rather as adjustments in the methods of keeping their Indian connection while retaining intact most of its fundamental advantages. At the centre of government in India, the powers of the Raj were increased; in the provinces more and more authority was entrusted to Indians. This system canalized much of Indian political action into the provinces. Moreover, by placing the new provincial administrations upon greatly widened electorates, it gave the Raj a further range of collaborators, selected now for their mastery of vote-gathering. The reforms of 1919 provoked another seminal development. By widening the functions of local government bodies in municipalities and the rural areas, which were to be chosen by the same voters who elected the new provincial councils, they linked the politics of the localities more closely to the politics of the province.

Three other articles in this issue of Modern Asian Studies endeavour to trace conceptual changes in the years surrounding the Opium War, and particularly those arising out of works appearing in Chinese on world geography and related Western knowledge. One such work, the Hai-kuo t'u-chih (Illustrated Gazetteer of Maritime Nations), has received mixed reviews since its original publication in 1844. Although read in its various editions by many late Ch'ing modernizers, it provoked sharp criticism on its suggested methods of handling foreign affairs and the outdatedness of its materials. Feng Kuei-fen (1809–74), for example, maintained that ‘only one sentence of Wei Yuan is correct: Learn the strong techniques of the barbarians in order to control them.’ Despite such criticism—generally less totally condemnatory than Feng's—this work not only influenced early modernizers in China but also proved popular among Japanese of the Bakumatsu period, illustrative of its importance in studies on initial East Asian reaction to Western in-trusion. The previous paper dealt with the Hai-kuo t'u-chih's perception of European imperialist expansion in South and South-east Asia. This paper will briefly analyze its significance in a different vein, namely through a more intensive examination of its place in the career and thought of its compiler, Wei Yüan (1794-1857). The acknowledgement that he was less typical than illustrative of his times must accompany the choice of Wei Yüan as a subject for study. A number of the scholargentry minority, he belonged to that even smaller group which rose above mediocrity by serious dedication to the political-intellectual roles traditionally accorded that class. He was specifically untypical in his combination of radical views on Confucian orthodoxy, intense concern for domestic administrative problems and finally relatively enlightened perspectives on the new Western presence in China. Though untypical, this very combination of unique qualities suggests Wei's significance. Tracing his relationship to domestic intellectual and political developments will provide a convenient approach to analyzing, again through this one individual example, the actual interplay between Western intrusion and conceptual change in mid-nineteenth-century China.

The essay explores a Greco-Arabic healing tradition that arrived in India with the Muslims and evolved with the expansion of the Mughal Empire. It came to be known as unani in the sub-continent. It studies unani texts and its practitioners in the critical period of transition to British rule, and questions the idea of ‘colonial medicine’ being the predominant site of culture and power. It shows that in the decades immediately preceding the early 19th century British expansion, unani underwent a critical transformation that was triggered by new influences from the Arab lands. These changes in local medical culture shaped the later colonial intrusions in matters related to health. The essay concludes that the pro-active role of the English Company and the wide usage of the printing press only added new contenders to the ongoing contest over medical authority. By the 1830s this complex interplay moved health away from its previous focus on individual aristocratic virtue, to the new domain of societal well being. It also projected the healer not merely as a gentleman physician concerned with individual health, but as a public servant responsible for the well being of society at large. These changes were rapid and survived the reforms of 1830s. They ensured that ‘colonial medicine’ remained entangled in local contestations over medical authority.

Around a century ago, in his “The Ideals of the East”, Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzô) proclaimed that “Asia is one”. This phrase, quoted repeatedly ever since, has been interpreted as representative of the ideology of Pan-Asianism (Han-Ajiashugi) or Asianism (Ajiashugi) in Japan. However, Okakura's writings were not widely read in Japan during the Meiji era and his originally English writings were translated into Japanese only in the 1930s. It must have been other authors that defined Pan-Asianism as a comprehensive ideology and brought this ideology closer to politics, a sphere where pan-Asian approaches were mostly rejected until the 1910s. This paper introduces the writings of Kodera Kenkichi (1877–1949), a politician and long-time member of the Lower House of the Imperial Japanese Diet, and identifies his “Treatise on Greater Asianism” (1916) as a central work in the history of the ideology of Asianism in modern Japan.

The May Thirtieth Incident which occurred in Shanghai during 1925 has been regarded by the Chinese as one of the most important events in modern Chinese history, and the incident has been called ‘Wu-san Ch'an-an’ (the May 30th Tragedy) ever since 1925. Yet only a few studies in the Western languages deal with such an important event. Among those few studies, two of them concentrate on the role of labor in the movement, and the other after collecting a lot of source materials decides to add a subtitle, ‘an outline’, to recognize the vastness and complexity of the subject without making much effort to analyze or discuss the movement.

During the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), the colonial authorities resettled an estimated half a million rural dwellers, mainly Chinese, from the fringe of the jungle, to cut them off from contact with armed members of the Malayan Communist Party. The re-location led to political alienation among many resettled in the nearly 500 New Villages. Winning their support against the insurgency therefore was urgent. At this juncture, foreign missionaries were forced to leave China following the communist takeover in October 1949. Many of these missionaries were Chinese-speaking with medical or teaching experience. The High Commissioner of Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney, and his successor, Sir Gerald Templer, invited these and other missionaries to serve in the New Villages. This paper looks at colonial initiatives and mission response amidst the dynamics of domestic politics and a changing international balance of power in the region.

This article explores the political dynamics of modern Chinese cultural conservatism. It proceeds from the premise that modern Chinese conservatism, as distinct from traditionalism, was a response to modernity and, as such, a part of modernity. The article identifies the conservative with the nationalist, but not vice versa, and understands politico-cultural conservatism as politico-cultural nationalism. It will first trace the rise of modern Chinese conservative thought, revisit the ideas of two noted cultural conservatives Liang Shuming and Zhang Junmai, examine the politics of China-based cultural reconstruction, and then explore the conservative thought of the war period (1937–1945) to illustrate the interplay of war, culture and nationalism. It argues, basically, that although the conservatives did not defend the prevailing socio-political order as a whole, their understanding of politics from a cultural perspective was nuanced and that they stood in an ambiguous relationship with the existing regime and the party-state.

It is a commonplace in modern Chinese history that the twin-concept of t'i–yung espoused a doctrine of cultural conservatism in late-Ch'ing China. Briefly, the dichotomy is seen as a call to preserve the ‘substance’ (t'i) of the Chinese cultural tradition by adopting the ‘function’ (yung) of Western technology, or simply, to strengthen Confucian China by implementing Western-inspired reforms; hence, the famous slogan, ‘Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application’ (Chung-hsueh wei-t'i Hsi-hsueh weiyung). Both the slogan and the position it reflects have long come under criticism. An early, influential critic was Yen Fu, the well-known interpreter of Social Darwinism in late-Ch'ing China. In 1902, in a published open letter to the editor of Wai-chiao pao (Foreign affairs magazine), Yen expanded on an earlier view of a contemporary schlar, Ch'iu T'ing-liang, that the notion of t'i-yung, when properly applied, refers to the two complementary aspects of a single entity and not to attributes from two different juxtaposed objects. To drive home his point, Yen cites an analogy. An ox as t'i has its yung, which is to carry heavy loads, whereas a horse as t'i has its yung, which is to go long distances. Now the attempt to combine a t'i with an extraneous yung is like ascribing a horse's function to an ox's body, or vice versa, and the result could only be a bizarre mismatch, an affront to nature's purposes.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was an epochal event in modern Chinese history. It marked the beginning of China's modern revolutionary era, and a new stage after the Republican Revolution of 1911. It was both anti-imperialist and anti-warlord, and represented the reaction of the Chinese people to the turbulent new forces unleashed by the First World War. In specific protest against the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty as they affected China, and against the terms of Japan's infamous ‘Twenty-one Demands’, huge student demonstrations were held in Peking on 4 May 1919 to denounce the pro-Japanese Peking government. This revolutionary tide soon spread rapidly throughout China, spearheading a rapid growth of mass consciousness and cultural change, and culminating in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, in the reorganization of the Kuomintang in 1924, and the establishment of a united front between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. It is the very importance of the May Fourth Movement (MFM) as well as its manifold repercussions and ramifications, which have complicated the problems of defining, interpreting, and evaluating the movement per se. The definition of its true nature and character, the clear identification of its actual leadership, and the realistic appraisal of its scope and achievements have all become matters of dispute. Ideological commitment, political ties, or professional interest have too often clouded the objectivity of individuals who have studied the movement—and hence their interpretations of it.

As a daily necessity for human life and also as a taxed commodity, salt has played an important part in the economic and political development of China. As salt is used regularly by all people, its annual consumption is largely predictable so that a tax on salt, as a disguised poll tax, provided the government with a reliable source of revenue. For this reason, it has drawn the special attention of statesmen and financiers throughout China's history. In terms of economic magnitude, the business of the production and marketing of salt was a major industry in agrarian China for centuries and the largest single economic undertaking in Ch'ing China (1644–1911). Control of salt and its financial gains frequently became the immediate objectives of revolutionaries, rebels, brigands, and other organized malcontents in China. The sources of salt supply in Ch'ing China were widespread. Several distinctive methods of production were employed in different areas. The distribution of salt involved all types of transportation available in traditional China. Its flow was well geared to the national, regional and local trade. This paper reconstructs the salt trade in Ch'ing China in its geographical context. It stresses five aspects: centers of production, state control, trade networks, means of transportation, and spatial structure of market areas.

Through a description of the interactions of Christian missionaries in Chhotanagpur with the Oraons, this article illustrates the different ways in which the missionaries grappled with and restructured their notions of the ‘tribe’ and the ‘Oraon’ across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Oraon, I argue, was initially recognized in terms of his heathen practices, his so-called compact with the Devil, and his world of idolatry and demonology. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, he increasingly became, in missionary language, an animistic aboriginal tribe, a ‘primitive’ within an evolutionary schema. As the missionaries searched for an authentic Oraon language, for myths, traditions and histories, an array of categories—heathen, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—seemingly jostled with one another in their narratives. Indeed, the tension between religion and race could never be resolved in missionary narratives; this was reflected in colonial ethnographic literature that drew upon and yet eventually marginalized missionary representations. I conclude by referring to a case in the 1960s filed by Kartik Oraon against the Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi, which was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court, that raised the question whether religion or race determined tribal identity.