Editor's Note: For the student of business history China has had a peculiar interest. It has illustrated forms and stages of business policy, organization, and technique which have nearly disappeared in the western world but which flourished there in medieval and early modern times. China, in a sense, has been somewhat in the nature of a contemporary ancestor of modern business as we know it. China's town economy, still generally prevailing in the great interior, is reminiscent of the town of medieval and early modern Europe with its small artisans and tradesmen and its market places which characterize the town and petty capitalist system of business; while China's commercial cities have marked the survival of the sedentary merchant and mercantile capitalism, long the great and coordinating business of the East as indeed it was of the West until about a century ago.

Pope & Talbot, Inc., pioneer San Francisco lumber and shipping firm, has made a $17,500 grant to the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the writing of the hundred-year history of the firm.

The research and writing will be done by Edwin T. Coman, director of the Graduate School of Business Library and assistant professor of business history. Miss Helen Gibbs, as research associate, will assist in the research and writing.

Business history as a separate field of academic study and research came into being twenty years ago this autumn. At its beginning it was little more than a name, but in those twenty years notable progress has been made in the development of research and teaching in the history of business. Basic research in business records has created a considerable fund of information. Wide preliminary explorations of the field have been made and a systematic concept of business genesis and evolution has been formulated. Courses of instruction in business history, whether nominal or real, have been established in several American universities. And increasingly over the years business men have been taking an interest in the subject.