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In the very extensive literature in the Chinese language, there is a vast store of material relevant to economic plants. The Chinese, a traditionally agrarian and at the same time utilitarian people, are also historically minded. They have recorded over 30 centuries much of their knowledge about plants, their occurrence, introduction, cultivation, variation, and utilization. The Chinese literature has frequently been pointed out as the best source material for studies on the domestication and utilization of cultivated plants. Many of our present important crop plants originated in China. A large number of cultivated plants of extra-Chinese origin had also been introduced into China in ancient and medieval times. This paper is an attempt to identify the principal vegetables cultivated in ancient China and to trace the fate of these crops during the course of the history. As the literature on plants in China is scattered among widely different sources, an exhaustive or definitive study is not here intended. Fortunately for our purpose, there is still preserved a complete treatise on agriculture more or less intact, the Ch'i-min-yao-shu (Essential arts for the people), by Chia Ssu-hsieh of the Later Huei of the Northern Dynasties. This book was produced in the late 5th or early 6th Century and is probably the oldest complete treatise on agriculture extant in any language. While this work does not describe the most ancient conditions of agriculture in China existing around 3,000 years ago, it does give us a full record of the situation of crop plants and agricultural practices in northern China along the Yellow River Valley about fourteen centuries ago. This is the region where the ancient Chinese civilization originated and developed in the earlier times. This work has recently been translated into modern Chinese and extensively annotated and commented on by Shih (6). He

This paper is intended first as a tribute to my teacher, and second as a small contribution to the perennial discussion of the place or extent of the tragic in Chinese literature. I shall plead limited space as excuse for refraining from philosophical discussion, definition, or comparison with Classical Greek or Shakespearean manifestations of the tragic. My suggestion will be simply that P'i-p'a chi ‘Lute song’ (hereafter ‘Lute’) may be added to Kuan Han-ch'ing's Ton O yuan and the ‘Red chamber dream ‘on that select list of Chinese works which in the conflicts they present and the resolutions they propose tend towards the tragic.

N THIS PAPER a number of generalizing hypotheses will be advanced about the predominant features of the literary forms and values of contemporary, post-1949 Chinese literature. In some respects the prevailing forms and values of contemporary Chinese literature are the outcome of a long literary tradition, whereas in other respects they are the result of a reevaluation of the traditional values and the introduction of new ones.

To SPELL OUT THE PROGRESS in Chinese studies in the last few years is to tell of advances all along the line. I wish I were equal to the task. In my own academic life-time the number of institutions offering courses in the field, the number of qualified teachers, the number and improvement of libraries of Chinese books and books on China, the number of museums which have worthy collections of Chinese objets d'art, the outpouring of funds, both government and private, on behalf of scholarships, fellowships, travel and research, the standard of our publications, the increase in archaeological activity on the mainland and elsewhereall these show marked development, some of them several hundred fold. This is not to report that the best of scholars today are quite the equal of, say, Wang Kuo-wei of China, Kuwabara Jitsuzo of Japan, Paul Pelliot and Henri Maspero of France, and Basil Alexeiev of Russia; still, there is a much larger number of specialists than there ever were a generation ago; there are more aids and tools to work with, so that one doesn't have to be possessed of the prodigious memory of bygone students of Chinese literature; and there is now available through modern methods of reproduction hundreds of important books and manuscripts formerly out of the reach of all but the most fortunate and most travelled inquirer. We are really most blessed. Our problem is to live up to our heritage. Parenthetically I should like to express our debt of gratitude to French scholarship for publishing posthumously a number of monographs by Maspero and Pelliot. For those of the latter we owe much especially to Louis iambis, who has lavished both time and expert knowledge upon them. Let me take up first one blessing which is practically new, at least during the last forty-odd years: the appearance of an ever-increasing number of indexes and concordances. One can truly say, I believe, that here is one western scholarly device, adopted by the Chinese, which is a genuine contribution to an area of study which they have long thought to be peculiarly their own. James Legge probably lighted the way about a century ago with the indexes of subjects, proper names, and Chinese characters and phrases which he made for his translations of The Chinese Classics. But these were incomplete. How often has one run into such old friends as passim, et al, and et saepe in one or another of his indexes and despaired of locating the passage sought for without reading the whole Classic. About the same time that Legge was producing his great series, W. F. Mayers, in his efforts to make use of Chinese cyclopedias of reference, ejaculated in 1869: "Yet alas! what student has not groaned in spirit over the chaotic arrangements, the absence of proper indexing and crossreferences, and, above all, the entire lack of information respecting the date and authorship of works quoted from in these vast compilations." As late as 1926 Paul Pelliot wrote, apropos a work by the distinguished scholar Lo Chen-yU (1866-1940), " Si du moins nos confreres chinois, dont les travaux sont si remarquables, s'avisaient d'en doubler l'utilite par les index! " One recourse in the 1920's was, of course, to hunt up some obliging Chinese friend who knew the whole canon by heart. But such people are becoming all too scarce these days. Their schooling, like our own, is given to stressing all the arts and sciences, and rarely does one encounter a youth today with a stomach full of classical knowledge. The first example of a Chinese produced index I know of (except for the index of all the biographies in the 24 dynastic histories compiled by Wang lui-tsu in 1783 and two similar works published in 1790 and 1800) is one for the very short Tao te ching brought out privately by Admiral Ts'ai T'ing-kan in 1922, a copy of which he gave me at the time, and which I treasure. A year earlier a Japanese scholar, Moriki Kakuzo, published an index of the Four Books, supplementing this service in the 1930's by one of the Five Classics; these, however, had their limitations, as only people acquainted with the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters could use them. The major step forward came with the inauguration in 1930 of the Harvard-Yenchinz Institute * This paper was delivered before a meeting of the American Oriental Society at Chicago on April 14, 1965.

Chinese literature, philosophy, and religion, and into other cultural aspects of Chinese life. The various weather types with which definitive botanical landscapes and emotional moods of the literati were closely linked have been sung and described time and again with poetic eloquence. The Chinese natural philosophers considered cyclical recurrence, of which the seasonal change of the monsoon was a typical example, to be the characteristic movement of the Tao, or the way of the universe. The sequential variations of weather events were empirically examined to provide a guide for selecting auspicious dates for certain social and agricultural activities. The occurrence of abnormal weather phenomena such as rampaging floods, scorching droughts, and severe cold was regarded by some Confucian philosopherstatesmen as a heavenly punishment of the bad rule of the emperor. Scientific inquiry into weather forecasting in China began less than fifty years ago. In 1945 Lu related the early experience in an article' that has been extolled as a model exposition of synoptic climatology based on the frontal and air-mass theory.2 In the postwar years the rapid accumulation of aerological data has solved many mysteries and has added a new dimension to the science of meteorology. In 1957 and 1958 a group of Chinese meteorologists at the Academia Sinica, Peking, skillfully presented and analyzed the general features of upper-air circulation in East Asia.3 However, many more details have since been brought to light in a number of studies-mostly published in Chinese journals-of which the present paper is an attempt at synthesis.