Leonard Blussé, doctorate (1986) Leiden University, is the author of Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (1986) and various articles on Asian trade. He has taught East Asian and Southeast Asian history at Leiden since 1977. He is currently secretary of the Research Institute for the History of European Expansion at Leiden University.

Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Ph.D. (1977) in History, University of California, Berkeley, has taught Chinese history at the Sinologisch Instituut, Leiden University since 1978. She is the author of Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of Hui-chou Prefecture 800-1800 (Brill, 1989), and is Editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.

This collection of essays written by his former students and colleagues represent the many foci of interest that Erik Zürcher has shared with them during his tenure as professor at Leiden University. They include discussions of Confucian philosophy, Buddhist and Christian polemics, the spread of Jesuit literature and anti-Christian attitudes among the literati, Ming aphorisms, the Chinese pictorial of skulls and skeletons, the Ch'ien-lung Emperor's eightieth birthday celebrations, Sino-Korean relations, and the "little traditions" in Chinese historical development, secret societies and kongsi. The book demonstrates how Zürcher inspired a wide range of interests in problems of Chinese history from heterodoxy, to local development, to hsiao-shuo traditions, but always in the highest traditions of philological scholarship.