Two years ago our revered elder statesman Kenneth Scott Latourette gave us a comprehensive review of the development during the last few decades of studies in the United States of the Sinic world. In a sense I wish to follow in his footsteps, on the one hand broadening the base to include studies by people of all nationalities, and on the other narrowing it or restricting it to cover only one branch of the many fields of learning represented by our membership. For good reasons too I limit the discussion to China alone. Not that important discoveries have not been made elsewhere, from the Indus River to the island of Hokkaido and from Siberia to the Maldive Islands, many of them bearing importantly on the growth of civilization amongst the Chinese people; a Han crossbow lock in Taxila, T'ang cash at Anuradhapura, a rock-cut representation of a Sung junk at Angkor, a late Han bronze at Oc-Eo, pre-Han silk in the frozen graves of the Altai, Ch'i state coins of the third century B.C. in northern Korea, and tenth-century block printing in the bosom of the lovely Buddhist statue which Chōnen brought back to Japan from Pien-liang in the year 985. All these and many more were discoveries of recent years in the regions now included in the Association for Asian Studies. One might, if desired, construct a much wider horizon, and so take in the Han dynasty hu or vase found in Dane John at Canterbury and now a prized possession of the British Museum, or Sung to Ming porcelain turned up at Fostat and the Kilwa Islands off the coast of Tanganyika, and the items of presumed Chinese inspiration discovered on the west coast of Central America and in Peru. But this would take us far afield, interesting though the subject may be. They show us how mobile the early Chinese were, or, if not the people themselves, certainly the work of their fingers, and how valued it was, giving tongue to the comment of Abū Zayd Ḥasan (ca. 916): “Amongst all the creatures of Allah, the Chinese have the cleverest hands at designing and creating things: for the execution of all manner of works there is no people in the world who can do better than they.”

En chine, depuis les seconds Han (25–220 A.D.), en Corée, depuis le VIe siècle, au Japon, depuis Shōtoku (593), le Bouddhisme est partout: doctrines, systèmes croyances, institutions politiques, architecture, sculpture, peinture, sur tous les domaines il est un facteur capital; sans lui, rien ne s'explique; autour de lui, tout s'éclaire et s'ordonne.”—Sylvain Lévi.

The post-Stalinist interest shown by the Soviet Union in the non-aligned nations of Southern Asia has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the quantity and quality of material dealing with this area appearing in leading Soviet scholarly journals. Though there has been the usual spate of propagandistic articles lauding the growing evidences of expanding cultural, economic, and political relations between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and India, Afghanistan, Burma, and Indonesia on the other, it would be a mistake to dismiss all such Soviet endeavors as unworthy of serious attention. Much of the material reflects a diligent effort by Soviet orientalists to analyze the past and the present of the nations of Southern Asia with a view toward making up for the previous period of flagrant neglect.