The ex-Portuguese town of Diu on the island with thesame name off the south coast of Saurashtra,Gujarat, is one of the best-preserved and yetleast-studied Portuguese colonial towns. Diu was thelast of the Portuguese strongholds in India, thecontrol of which was finally achieved in 1539 aftermany years of futile struggle and frustratingnegotiations with the sultanate of Gujarat. Duringthe late sixteenth and seventeenth century Diuremained a main staging post for Portuguese trade inthe Indian Ocean, but with the appearance of theDutch, and later the French and British, on thescene the island gradually lost its strategicimportance. The town was subjected to littlerenovation during the nineteenth century while inthe twentieth century Diu was no more than anisolated Portuguese outpost with meagre trade untilit was taken over by India in 1961. As a result,unlike the other former Portuguese colonies in India– Daman and Goa – Diu has preserved most of itsoriginal characteristics: a Portuguese colonial townplan, a sixteenth-century fort and a number of oldchurches, as well as many of the eighteenth andnineteenth-century houses.

Detective fiction counts amongst the most successfulliterary products that the metropolitan west hasexported to the world periphery. Between the end ofthe nineteenth century and the outbreak of theSecond World War the genre acquired a globalpresence – both in the form of translations ofexisting works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories,and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations.This kind of literature represented a prime exampleof the mass-produced and mass-circulated printentertainment that was part and parcel of theemergence of mass consumption as a social form.Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and anexpression of modernity. While some literarytheorists have pointed to longstanding historicalantecedents, detective fiction would not have madesense in earlier historical epochs. The principlesof scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout,not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifyingglasses, finger-prints and assorted scientificapparatuses, but in terms of the subject matteritself – the fact that it is possible to make senseof an increasingly confusing world by uncoveringhidden causal connections through rationalenquiry.

The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a givenChinese character may change its meaning when itsreading is altered slightly. Modern scholars havesought principles for these changes, and from thoseprinciples have reconstructed a skeletal system ofearly Chinese morphology – with such elements asderivation by tone change, causative infixes,transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arrestingfact that some of pre-modern China's linguisticallymost astute scholars inveighed against the multiplereadings on which this research is based. They seemto have held strong opinions, not always madeexplicit, about precisely how it is that Chinesecharacters represent language. These two views,modern and traditional, represent fundamentallydifferent models of how early Chinese evolved intomodern Chinese.

Research on the subject of Chinese communism has longbeen marred by the “spotlight approach”, which, asKathleen Hartford rightly criticises, “illuminateskey actors and events, but leaves in the shadow theaction transpiring in the corners of the historicalstage”. Assuming that only a few great names andsignal events bear relevance to its development,such an approach often produces simplified picturesof the Chinese communist revolution. During the lastdecade or so, however, an increasing number ofhistorians have begun to take seriously the greatcomplexities and diversities involved in thisrevolutionary movement. Using newly availablecommunist Party sources, they have ventured toexcavate forgotten or even deliberately ignoredepisodes in the history of the Chinese CommunistParty (CCP). In so doing, they have not onlyexpanded the scope of enquiry in Chinese communismbut also provided new evidence for testing oldinterpretive structures. This article joins thattrend by presenting the little-known story of theCommunist struggle in rural areas of the Guangdongprovince from 1928 to 1936.

D. N. MacKenzie was a scholar of Middle and ModernIranian languages who has left an impressive body ofpublications.