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BOOK REVIEWS
dilettante. Nevertheless, one would have wished for at least a reproduction of one of the many important Lan-t'ing rubbings which form such an important part of the book. The reviewer therefore begs the permission of the editor of this journal to reproduce one of the most interesting versions of the Lan-t'ing mentioned in the text; that of an early rubbing of the version caused to be carved by the Sung calligrapher Hsueh Shou-p'eng, supposed one-time owner of the ting-wu stone, from a T'ang copy of the "original".*
Chinese University of Hong Kong.
NOTES
J. C. Y. WATT.
1 For a critical account of the Tu-hui Pao-chien, see Yu Shao-sung's (***) Shuhua shulu chieh-t'i (#£###).
2 Almost from the beginning, there have been scholars who were sceptical of the authenticity of the version which appeared at the beginning of the Tang and good copies of which have been handed through the centuries as being very near the original. However, up till the beginning of this century, sceptics have been "laughed off the stage" by "those who know". The controversy nevertheless continued. The last outburst was in 1965 when a series of articles appeared in the journal Wen-wu, which were sparked off by the discovery of the tombstone of one of Wang Hsi-chih's cousins. For the first time, the sceptics, led by a figure no less than Kuo Mo-jo himself (President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and grand old man of letters in China), had the upper hand - with the help of archaeological evidence.
* See Plate 31.
LONG-TERM ECONOMIC AND AGRICULTURAL COMMODITY PROJECTIONS FOR HONG KONG 1970, 1975 and 1980, by The Economic Research Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1969, 248 pp.
Reading this study puts one in mind of a music student patiently practising scales on a piano - an exercise, apparently pointless and ploddingly executed, yet with the virtues of keeping the student busy and contributing to some unseen attainment. The authors of this study, directed by Professor Tang, nowhere explain why they wrote it beyond stating that the U.S. Department of Agriculture paid them to make these commodity projections. Perhaps cash is regarded as a self-explanatory motive for academic research in Hong Kong. Nor does the conception of the study become any clearer to