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From earliest times, both China and Japan developed sophisticated traditions in education. China’s major educational aspiration, based on Confucianism, was centered on developing the heart-mind for exemplary moral conduct. Buddhism was also influential, as were Daoism in China and Shinto in Japan, but Confucian values dominated educational thought and institutions, including private academies. In China the civil service examination system played a major role in molding the educational curriculum. Japan, heavily influenced by Chinese Confucianism, adapted it to a very different culture, society, and political system. At the elementary level so-called temple schools, actually private secular institutions, focused on teaching literacy. Along with government schools and local academies, they flourished in Tokugawa Japan, educating both samurai and commoners. In both China and Japan, schooling for girls was not as widespread as for boys. Women were expected to manage the household and educate their children, while men managed public affairs.

As far as I know,the first gathering for the purpose of advancing Song studies on either shore of the Atlantic took place in the spring of 1961 at the annual Association for Asian Studies meeting in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. The atmosphere was quite informal, so I do not believe anyone took minutes. Despite the efforts of the AAS Secretariat, I have been unable to obtain documentation,for their copies of the AAS Newsletter do not go back that far. At the time I do not think we proclaimed this occasion as Sung I. Quite likely it acquired that designation only after plans were afoot for Sung II,which—after several delays—finally took place in Germany in 1971. Alas, all but one of the six people I recall as fellow participants are now deceased and the only co-survivor, Jonathan Mirsky,has no recollection of the event! Can my memory be so faulty? Well, regardless, for better or worse, my account has to rely solely on my sagging memory with all its quirks, flying solo as it were with minimal instrumentation hoping not to crash . • • Jonathan Mirsky,who was to become the well known expert on contem porary China and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books,was at the time working on the Tang. He was there (if indeed he was) because in 1961 there were neither enough Song or conquest dynasties scholars to lend credibility to our championship of Song studies nor was the number sufficient to convince the profession of the probability of our ever reaching critical mass. To be sure, the profession itself was so much smaller at the time. As I recall all too well,in i960, there were two openings in Chinese history in the whole country (at the University of Iowa and at Swarthmore College). Thus, half a dozen was hardly an impressive number but it did amount at that time to not quite 1 percent of the 640 attendees at the 1961 meeting.1 Our number was small but the world was young and full of promise. We had a sense that just as the Song marked a new stage of Chinese history we

These essays examine the relation of society and the state or, more broadly, the place of political action in society and in the history of Sung China. Connections between intellectual change and sociopolitical change are a consistent focus; attitudes toward history and problems of authority are a recurrent concern. The authors suggest new kinds of continuity between the disparate intellectual worlds of Northern and Southern Sung China. Their findings have important implications for our understanding of the neo-Confucian movement in Sung history and of the Sung in the history of Chinese ideas about politics and social action.