During the years 1851 to 1864 a central feature of the Chinese political scene was the Taiping rebellion. This was a peasant movement led by disappointed candidates in the official examinations and unlettered men of native military and organizational genius who capitalized upon the economic distress of the time and the declining ability of the Manchu rulers to take the principal cities of the Yangtze valley and at one point to threaten Peking itself. The rebels maintained their capital in Nanking from 1853 until 1864. From this point they waged intermittent campaigns in the provinces from Hunan and Hupeh east to the sea and thus denied the ruling dynasty the rich lower-Yangtze revenue for more than a decade. The rebellion was active at one time or another in fourteen of the eighteen provinces of the empire. Antidynastic societies not part of the Taiping movement used the embarrassment of the dynasty to disrupt areas which the Taipings did not reach. From the military point of view the Ch'ing dynasty was probably threatened most seriously in 1853 when the rebels got to within thirty miles of Tientsin. But if the Taiping troops were never again able to invade Chihli, neither were the imperial soldiers capable of regaining the Yangtze basin. After 1853 it required eleven years of punitive expeditions, the training of a new type of provincial militia, and incidental foreign aid to put down the rebellion.

It has been a common belief of students of Chinese history that the “One Hundred Days of Reform” of 1898 got under way only after Weng T'ungho, the imperial tutor and associate grand secretary, popularly known to foreigners as China's prime minister, strongly recommended the reformer K'ang Yu-wei to the Emperor Te-tsung in the spring of that eventful year. So strong has been this impression that Weng was alleged to have said that his own official career hinged upon whether or not K'ang could make a favorable impression upon the emperor in June 1898. Weng, therefore, has been regarded as the sponsor if not the official leader of the reform party. A critical examination of the contemporary Chinese sources, however, reveals that in the spring of 1898, when nationwide reform was in the air, Weng was in reality an opponent of systematic innovation, although he had previously endorsed K'ang and his program. It is the aim of this article to test the truth of the common belief that Weng was the key high official who persistently patronized the reform movement.

Among the railway concessions obtained by Britain from the Chinese government during the battle for concessions in 1898 was one covering a line that would branch off from the Shanghai-Nanking Railway (another British concession) at Soochow, run southwestward to Hangchow, at the head of the Ch'ien-t'ang estuary, and turn southeastward to terminate at the treaty port of Ningpo. Traversing the coastal areas of Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces, a fertile and well-populated region, the economic possibilities of this railway had been long recognized by the British. After an unsuccessful attempt to make it an Anglo-German enterprise in 1897-98, the concession was granted to the British and Chinese Corporation, a British syndicate formed that year by the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Jardine, Matheson and Company for the furtherance of British railway interest in China. The line was to be financed and constructed by the corporation under the nominal ownership of the Chinese Imperial Railway Administration.

The Major steps taken in the settlement of the Indonesian dispute on November 1, 1949, at the Hague and the subsequent transformation of the East Indian Archipelago into a modern national state have thrown into even sharper focus the recent significant changes in the political constitution of the once great colonial powers. The solution of the Indonesian problem has in no small measure been based on a recognition of the mutual economic and cultural interdependence of the two disputants. With this recognition the political factors of the problem have lost much of their controversial nature. The future of the Netherlands Commonwealth, on the basis of a harmonious co-operation in the realms of trade, agriculture, industry, and cultural exchange between the various partners, seems assured. Although the period of armed conflict between Indonesians and Dutch would justify the assumption that the Dutch wished to continue exclusive political control over the Indies it now seems that Dutch recognition of Indonesian national sovereignty might eliminate any lingering suspicion in the minds of Indonesian nationalists. The question of political liberty, once regarded, even by the United Nations mediators, as the nub of a possible settlement of the conflict has lost much if not all of its meaning. Colonial sovereignty, and all that it entails, has now come to an end.

After graduation from Yale College in 1928 Raymond Kennedy began, almost fortuitously, a career in Far Eastern affairs by teaching for a year at the Brent School in the Philippines, Then, a year later, he became a field representative for General Motors in what was then called the Netherlands East Indies. As the peripatetic automobile salesman discovered the cultural riches of the fabulous Indies, he became progressively less interested in American machines and more fascinated by Indonesian people. This led him to give up his commercial job and return to his alma mater in New Haven for graduate study in anthropology and sociology. He knew well that “he who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. ” Thus began the academic career of one of American's pioneer scholars in the field of Southeast Asian studies.