Tīmūr (or Tamerlane), the Barlas tribesman whose empirestretched from the Mediterranean to India in theearly fifteenth century has been a much studied andmuch romanticized figure in the history of CentralAsia. His displays of macabre and often brutalintimidation of enemies have become almost aslegendary as his military prowess. Indeed, Westernlegend of Tīmūr is as full of spine-tinglinggrotesquerie as any Gothic novel, and has beenembellished far beyond plausibility.

The Gurjara Pratīhāras have long been recognised as theleading royal house of northern India during theninth and tenth centuries. A considerable number ofcopper plate and stone inscriptions have survivedfrom Pratīhāra times and these have provided therequisite data for a reconstruction of the dynasty'spolitical and social history. Following conventionsestablished in the Gupta period if not before, thecopper-plates of the Pratīhāras record grants ofvillages or land, while stone inscriptions typicallyrecount the building of temples and the provision ofgifts to enshrined divinities. A large number oftemples from the Pratīhāra age have been preserved;some of these buildings have enjoyed the recentscholarly attention of the team working on theEncyclopaedia of Indian TempleArchitecture as well as the Temple Surveyof the Archaeological Survey of India. In contrast,palatial architecture is virtually unknown. This isneither surprising nor unusual, there being littleleft of such buildings in any part of India frombefore the fourteenth century. This is due to thewide use of perishable building materials, notablywood, brick and stucco. In the case of the Pratīhārarulers there is also the fact that their capitalcity of Kannauj (anc. Kānyakubja) has beencompletely destroyed. That the Pratīhāras wereresponsible for some building at Kannauj isindicated by the inscription, dated Harṣa year 276(A.D. 882–3), from the shrine of Garībnāth atPehowa. This inscription records, among many otherthings, that a temple of Viṣṇu Garuḍāsana was builtby the Brāhmaṇa Bhūvaka on the banks of the riverGaṅgā in Bhojapura near Kānyakubja.

India during the period of the Mughal dynasty(sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) is exceptionallywell illuminated by a large body of historicalliterature, mainly in Persian. This literaturefollowed the traditions of classical Persianhistoriography, the models of which like Yazdi'sZafarnama (a history of Timur)and Mir Khwand's Rauzatu's Safa (ahistory of the world), both written in the fifteenthcentury, were widely read in India. By its veryvolume, if nothing else, Mughal historiography has,however, to be studied and assessed separately. Itmay be recalled that when C. A. Storey made hisgreat survey of Persian historical literature, workswritten on Indian history accounted for a major partof it providing 475 items, by authors (nos.612–1087), as against 299 (nos. –611) concerned withPersia, and Central Asia and countries other thanIndia. And among the works written in India thosewritten in Mughal times again account for theoverwhelming part.

Tan Sitong's summary execution at the close of theHundred Days Reform (1898) inadvertently threw hiswife, Li Run, into the public limelight. Followingthe September coup, the Guowen bao(National News) in Tianjin carried a story, entitled“Tan liefu zhuan” (Biography of the virtuous womanTan), in which Li allegedly committed suicide byslashing her throat on learning of her husband'sfate. She died broken-hearted, it was said, inprotest against the wicked court ministersresponsible for Tan's death. The story was quicklyreprinted in Qingyi bao (The ChinaDiscussion), a periodical which Liang Qichao, areformer in exile, started in Yokohama, Japan, asone prong of his anti-Qing campaign. The report onLi's demise continued to circulate. Twenty yearslater, when the Chinese scholar, Yi Zhongkui,compiled his Xin shishuo (Sequel toNew Account of Tales of theWorld), he included a short biography of LiRun, based on the Guowen baoaccount. More recently, in her Chinese Womenin a Century of Revolution 1850–1950, OnoKazuko refers to the suicide story and wiselycautions about its veracity. But she adduces noevidence to confirm what actually did happen to LiRun in 1898.

Surprisingly, the history of Chinese studies in Britainhas received little academic attention. In fact, itsdevelopment in the twentieth century, and itsproblems and lack of world standing actually tell usmuch about the background to Sino-British relations,and especially about the resources available toenable those interested, for professional, business,evangelical or plainly academic reasons, tounderstand China and the Chinese. British sinologyin the interwar period, if discussed at all, isroutinely condemned by historians. After 1949 Chinawas closed off to outside contacts; notsurprisingly, commentators thereafter look backjealously to the opportunities for close andfrequent contact that were available before therevolution but which they saw as being apparentlywasted. This common judgement does not, however, dofull justice to the scale of the underlyingproblems, especially financial ones, faced byacademic institutions that taught Chinese.

With reference to the interesting article by Laxman S.Thakur in JRAS, vol. 4, part 3(1994) entitled “A Tibetan inscription by lHa Bla-maYe-shes-'od from dKor (sPu) rediscovered”, I thinkthe inscription cannot be attributed to Ye-shes-'odbut rather to one of his descendants, thebstan-po lha-sras mentioned in 1.5 whose name has unfortunately been effaced.