A Message from the President

A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT What sort of thing is our family wealth?-Piles of books arrayed up to the rafters. In my lofty study at dawn I open a volume, And alone share in the words of the sages. Though men superior and wise have lived in every era, We have all esteemed each other's minds. But these bookworms I see on roy desk Still far surpass my ordinary companions. ("Reading," by pli Jih-hsiu, tr. William H. Nienhauser. Jr.) i Coming upon this lyric of the late-Trang poet p'i Jih-hsLu, it occurred to me that we scholars of T'ang civilization all share P'i's love of reading Chinese texts and his delight in discovering the wise minds of bygone days. We are perhaps different from him only in our desire not to keep our discoveries to ourselves but to share them with others. This is precisely what the T'ang Studies Society and its publication, T'ang Studies, are all about: a means of encouraging a broad disciplinary inquiry into the T'ang dynasty. and a forum for the sharing of news of the field and the communication of scholarly discovery. For various reasons we have been late in organizing ourselves as a constituent unit within the field of Chinese scholarship. Now, within the space of a year we have begun recruiting a growing membership, we have launched the first edition of our house organ, and we are getting some sense of who we areas a community of scholars and what our organizational goals need to be. If we have been tardy in getting started, our journey has at least begun and we are looking forward to what the next turn in the road will bring. It is a pleasure for me to welcome all of you to our fold. I am certain that in coming years the T'ang Studies Society will make significant contributions to scholarship concerning not merely our particular period of Chinese history but! to the study of China in general. I look forward to seeing many of you at our second Annual Meeting to be held in San Francisco in March, 1983. Howard J. Wechsler President 3 ...