Editor's Note

Following the first two installments in our series "Sinology Around the World," we were pleasantly surprised to receive a letter from Professor Glen Dudbridge of Cambridge University.

Besides writing to say that he had received copies of Sinorama from us and from a friend in Taiwan, he specially noted, ". . . My earlier experiences with journalists have not always been so fortunate--they like to edit and rewrite to suit their own purposes, but I find that you have very scrupulous ly reported the substance of the conversation we had together that day. I enjoyed the occasion particularly because you kept your questions entirely on matters of research--also rare in my experience."

Scholars think reporters are too frivolous, and reporters think scholars are too academic--it's always been a difficult dilemma to solve. Frankly speaking, as editors of a variety magazine, we understand that readers may well be curious about the family life of a French scholar cum Taoist priest, and that when we put the main emphasis of our interviews on academic questions readers may well ask: Why do you want to talk to foreigners about the Taoism and Journey to the West? Isn't that barking a bit up the wrong tree?

Why do we? Western sinologists like Dudbridge and Schipper are renowned for their scholarship but diffident in the extreme. Schipper said they're only "learning about" Chinese culture and not really "researching" it. "If Western sinology has some significance, it's in cultural interchange," he said, responding to the question with the apt analogy of a gene bank (see page 119). His answer lies at the heart of our intentions in presenting this series: The heritage of Chinese culture is the world's business, and we hope to know something of how it is studied and understood in the West.