Policies and Institutions of the Oboi Regency 1661–1669
During the 1660's four Manchus dominated the Chinese empire from the court at Peking. These four, Soni, Suksaha, Ebilun, and Oboi, had been appointed in the “Imperial Will” of the late Shun-chih Emperor to serve as Regents during the minority of the K'ang-hsi Emperor. For the first five years of the Regency these Manchus governed collectively. After 1666, however, one of the Regents, Oboi, managed to concentrate power in his own hands and to eliminate the influence of the other Regents. In the years of 1667–69, the young K'ang-hsi Emperor, assisted by his grandmother (the Grand Empress Dowager) and several Manchu advisers, sought to assert personal control over the Ch'ing state and to eliminate the ambitious Oboi. Eventually, in June, 1669, the Emperor arrested Oboi and put an end to his faction of relatives and supporters.
Communication and Imperial Control in China: Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693-1735
Montesquieu used the term feudalism. Sentences such as the following (p. 29) could well be replaced with an abbreviated and clearer version: 'In a fully developed stratified society, high status persons are privileged to enjoy almost unimpeded access, low status folk have only impaired access, to the community resources and are hedged about by socially sanctioned restraints which can often be circumvented only by the payment of dues, rents, or taxes either in labor or in kind.' Romanized versions of Chinese names and words are given in Karlgren's reconstructed Archaic version as well as in Wade-Giles, in the belief that the former 'helps us to recover some of the sensuous texture of that ancient world and enables us to give the ancient names something approaching, however imperfectly, their original sound' (p. xvi). Readers may judge how far examples such as ** Giwo-Kung (TtiKung) or ** Miwen-tjok (Min-chu) succeed in achieving this objective; and the result is to produce a text which is pretentious, ponderous and irritating to the sinologist, and all but incomprehensible to those who are unfamiliar with Karlgren's work and its drawbacks. Owing partly to this feature and to its layout, the glossary is clumsy to use, despite Mrs T'ung's excellent calligraphy; and it could have been reproduced with far greater economy. Bibliographical information is scanty. A glance at the gilded cover of the book suffices to remind us once again that all that glitters is not gold.
Novel method for the determination of the methoxyl content in lignin by headspace gas chromatography.
The paper reports on a headspace gas chromatographic (HS-GC) method for the determination of methoxyl in lignin. The method involves the quantitive cleavage of methoxyl with hydroiodic acid (HI) to form methyl iodide in a closed headspace sample vial at 130 °C for 30 min. After HI has been added, the sample is neutralized by injecting a sodium hydroxide solution; the methyl iodide in the vial was determined by HS-GC using a flame ionization detector. The results showed that the method has an excellent measurement precision (RSD < 0.69%) and accuracy (RSD < 3.5%) for the quantification of methoxyl content in lignin. The present method is simple and accurate and can be used for the efficient determination of methoxy1 content in lignin and related materials.