The author reinterprets the phenomenon of qingyi (represented by members of the Qingliu and Emperor's party) as passing through five phases from 1875 to 1898, in the course of which it enlarged its scope of demands by lower- and middle-grade metropolitan officials for a broader distribution of political power and contributed to the formation of public opinion. This evolution was attended by the rise of analogous demands for political restructuring by men in two other environments: extrabureaucratic managerial and scholarly circles and the treaty ports. Militant patriotism mobilized and eventually united different groups, stimulating nationally conscious opinion that was alienated from the political leadership. The failure of government leaders to accommodate new political initiatives redirected qingyi into provincial movements and set the stage for the competition between centralizing bureaucratic and societally based programs for change that led to the 1911 revolution.

The author reconstructs the religious idea and ritual that lie behind the “Songs of the Dead.” The three songs attributed to Empress Saimei in the Nihonshoki (nos. 119–121) are interpreted as sung by a dead person's spirit sailing to the nether world. They must have been handed down by the Asobi-be—shamans who appeased dead emperors' spirits—because these and other funeral songs in the Kojiki use similar verse forms. The Ryō no Shūge says that the Asobi-be's services involved two persons called Negi and Yoshi. Negi appeased the spirit who possessed Yoshi; the empress's songs must originally have been sung by Yoshi. The ritual behind the “Songs of the Dead” also helps us to understand the origins of Nō, especially of mugen nō, and to perceive the connection between Nō and the development of Kabuki in the early seventeenth century.

Recent developments in Korean archaeology, especially the discovery of well-preserved rice grains in clear archaeological contexts, have caused a reassessment of the timing, distribution, causes, and effects of the beginning of rice agriculture in Korea. Kim puts the rice discoveries in historical perspective, discusses details of the recent evidence, and explores possible diffusion routes based on the new data. Choe focuses on semi-lunar knives—the agricultural tools believed to be associated with rice cultivation. The typology of the knives and the distribution and chronology of the types are used to propose a diffusion route directly into Korea from North China. Nelson examines the cultural changes from the preceding Chŭlmun period when rice grains and semi-lunar knives are found. Mechanisms to explain the change are proposed as hypotheses. Comments on the papers disclose an agreement on the likelihood of a northern diffusion route, but no consensus on the cultural processes.

Korea is a small peninsula with an area of 220,839 square kilometers. It is a mountainous land, with only one-fifth of the area available for cultivation. The peninsula belongs to the temperate zone, but the north is colder and more arid while the south is humid and hot in the summer, like the monsoon zone of southeast Asia and Japan. The south has a yearly rainfall of 800 to 1,000 millimeters, and 60 percent of the precipitation occurs in the summer months from June to early September.

Problems concerning the emergence and geographical diffusion of food production in East Asia have long interested archaeologists and historians. However, attempts to reconstruct the chronology and diffusion routes from the so-called nuclear zones of both North and South China through the Korean peninsula and Japan have been less than convincing. In North China, the crops involved were millet (Setaria italica) and kaoliang (Sorghum vulgare); in South China, rice (Oryza sativa japonica and indica).

Rice was first introduced from China 1122 B.C., but millet had already been grown there for many centuries.” When Hulbert (1906:15) wrote these words in the early years of this century, he presumably followed some written or oral tradition regarding Kija's (Chi-tzu), the legendary agnate of the last Shang king, bringing rice to Korea. It is interesting that there was a tradition that millet cultivation preceded rice, which came from northern China at approximately 1100 B.C. Seventy-five years after Hulbert recorded the tradition in English, archaeological research has demonstrated that millet did precede rice in Korea, and that the timing of the introduction of rice at the end of the Shang dynasty is probably too late rather than too early.

Since the mid-1970s, Korean archaeologists have turned their interests to sociocultural change in Korean prehistory rather than simply the analysis of stylistic variation of artifacts. Studies on subsistence patterns in both the Chŭlmun and Mumun periods have been greatly encouraged and aided by scientific excavations. As in many other areas of the world, plant domestication has not been thoroughly studied in Korea.

K. C. Chang's Shang Civilization is an invaluable, encyclopaedic guide to the archaeology, anthropology, and culture of East Asia's first historical dynasty. After a summary of the book's scope and a sampling of its interpretations, the review discusses six of Chang's major themes: (1) the acceptance of the “longer” rather than “shorter” dynastic chronology; (2) the identification of Cheng-chou as a Shang capital; (3) the hypothesis that two major groups held royal power in alternate generations; (4) the extent to which the states surrounding the Shang enjoyed cultural and ethnic unity; (5) the existence of numerous walled towns; and (6) the relation between bronze tools and agricultural productivity.

Early Southeast Asia is an impressive collection of papers dealing with the archaeology, history, epigraphy, art history, and geography of early Southeast Asian states and their development. The high scholarship of individual contributions notwithstanding, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the past thirty years have seen relatively little progress in understanding this important aspect of the social and cultural history of the region. Archaeologists have made many important new discoveries but have been unable to bring them to bear within a historical synthesis; related disciplines have dealt with other types of evidence but also seem unable to translate them into a common language of cultural and social meaning.