‘I am of course opposed to the driving out of the Malay, but would rather have the land occupied and planted with rubber than lying absolutely uncultivated as it had been’. J. S. Mason, British Adviser Kelantan, 21.7.1911.

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.

The significance of the coup d'état of 1861 in late-Ch'ing history has been appraised by many scholars. A fairly typical viewpoint has been expressed by the eminent Chinese historian Wu Hsiang-hsiang: ‘Had there not been the coup of 1861, there would not have been the coup of 1898.’ One need not entertain the same degree of determinism to acknowledge, with Wu, that the coup of 1861 was important in its effects on the exercise of imperial power in later decades. The coup did, in fact, not only provide the immediate circumstances which favored an unprecedented experiment with the Ch'ing imperial form, namely, a regency formed by the empresses-dowager, but it did also enable the famous (or infamous) empress-dowager, Tz'u-hsi, to secure her rise to a supremacy in court affairs which ended only with her death in 1908. In view of this second development, scholars have long argued that Tz'u-hsi was both the mastermind and chief beneficiary of the coup, which was the product of her intrigues and manipulations. In fact, it has been called her (Yehonala's) coup d'état. While this view will presently be examined, my main purpose here is to define the nature of the political crisis from which the coup of 1861, as well as the idea of the female regency, originated. This, I believe, is one aspect of the subject that has not been sufficiently investigated.

In 1959 a collection of over twenty thousand Chinese-language documents, previously kept in the rambling Peking compound which had housed the British Legation (latterly, British Embassy) since 1861, was transmitted to the Public Record Office in London. It was given the class title Papers in the Chinese Language and the class number FO 682. The documents, some of which were rumoured to have been lying among the rafters of the Legation chapel, arrived in a state of confusion. Early attempts at listing reflected rather than resolved the confusion, but the documents are in fact far from being the trackless jumble sometimes supposed.

The 1870s witnessed mounting tension among East Asian countries. In 1874,. Japan sent an expeditionary force to Taiwan to punish the aborigines there who had, in 1871, killed fifty-four shipwrecked Ryūkyūans (Liu-ch'iuans). By doing so, according to many scholars today, Japan was able to claim retroactively that the Ryūkyūan castaways were legally Japanese subjects, thereby ending the Sino-Japanese dispute over the ambiguous political status of the Ryūkyū Islands (the Chūzan Kingdom of Ryūkyū paid tribute to both China and the Satsuma-han of Japan before the 18705).

This paper is a reappraisal of this episode of the ‘Quasi-war’ in East Asia. By going into the Chinese, Japanese, Ryūkyūan, and Western sources, it unfolds some unknown events which directly and indirectly led to the Japanese decision to send forces to Taiwan, as well as the Chinese reactions. The conclusion of this paper refutes the customary view which holds that China had in 1874 ‘renounced her claim over Ryūkyū and yielded to the Japanese claim she had earlier disputed.’ As this paper will show, neither Soejima Taneomi nor Ōkubo Toshimichi had succeeded in securing any Chinese endorsement of Japan's sovereign right over Ryūky¯. Nor did the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1874, concerning the settlement of the Taiwan crisis, legally settle the Ryūkyū problem, since Ryūky¯ was never mentioned in the Treaty. As a result, the issue continued to trouble Peking and Tokyo in the years that immediately followed.

As the universality of political economy has receded before the myriad instances of particular economic rationalities, it has become increasingly clear that most non-capitalist structures are organized around a multi-centric set of dynamics. In this regard one would expect to find that the economic as a category possesses less univocal clarity and its precise sense is only vouchsafed through a cognisance of the broader, integrating set of validating principles. This would be true as much in Mauss's analysis of the Gift as it would be in relation to the dynamics of a feudal economy. In the first instance the transactional medium and symbolic sense of the act contains within it the premises of an entire system, while in the second example the implied free-play of economic indices rests, in reality, on the intervention of extra-economic factors, in this case, the intervention of the seigneury. From the case of one transactional exchange to the dynamics of an entire system, common to both is the reallocation of the category ‘economic’ and its merger with criteria and principles of a wider and more diffuse nature.

If it is true that under the mantle of respectability accorded to the Indian epics and Purāāas one finds all manner of ribaldry and indecorous behavior, then perhaps when one delves into the ill-famed world of nauṭankī one will find a much more straightlaced and conservative view of reality than one might expect. Nauṭankī is the popular theatre tradition of the Hindi and Urdu speaking regions of North India, and in particular of Uttar Pradesh. For anyone beginning research on nauṭankī, the issue of its reputation is unavoidable. Hiraman, the innocent cartdriver in Phanishwarnath Renu's Hindi short story The Third Vow, knew from hearsay that nauṭankī shows were not a proper pastime, though he didn't quite know why, and the knowledge didn't prevent him from falling in love with a nauṭankī actress. Similarly, the Hindi drama critics, if they mention nauṭankī at all, repeat vague warnings; the form is crude and debased, not much can be expected from it. Rām Nārāyaā Agravāl, author of Sāngīt, the leading Hindi monograph on the subject, describes its current state as one of commercial ruin, artistic bankruptcy, and sexual display. Female Indian friends simply comment, ‘We were never allowed to see those plays,’ or ‘Why don't you study something nice?’