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count given in the book-length study. Personally, being interested in military matters, I would have liked to have had more information on the recruitment, organization and officering of the “Ever Triumphant Army”. If not in this account, where else? It is too shadowy a body for my liking. Nor is there enough about Giquel in the Introduction, and unlike me, many readers may not have the other book to hand for reference. This handicap sometimes applies in reverse, since there are no maps in Transferring Technology, and the useful section in the Diary giving biographical vignettes only appears in that work. Finally, in neither work are we told anything about Giquel's wife and children, and the Giquel family, although the 1864 diary and other papers came from his grand-daughter's home.
Notwithstanding these observations, readers will find much of interest in these fascinating works which relate to a man who clearly had much to offer, did his best, and assuredly deserves to be better known and appreciated, especially in China itself.
JAMES HAYES
Frank Ching, Ancestors, 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family. London, Harrap, 1988, pp. 528.
Frank Ching is a journalist. He has the journalist's eye for the dramatic and unusual. He knows a good story when he sees one, and how to put it across. These gifts have served him well in his first book, an account of his own family over nearly a millennium.
The book comprises a series of studies of eminent persons of the Ching lineage from whom he is directly descended. In such studies, motivated by the desire to get at one's roots, there is always the danger that we shall get hagiography rather than history, but there are few signs of this. The author has set himself high standards. Starting, as he tells us in the prologue, from scratch in as complex and difficult a field as Chinese historiography, it is remarkable that he has achieved such a tour de force. The book is of great and absorbing human interest, perhaps heightened for readers by the fact that there is a direct connection with a living person. It has been assiduously researched, in person and using the best authorities, and is well organized and beautifully written.