In the latest of the <a href="http://www.aasianst.org/catalog/jas.htm#62:4" title="Volume 62, Issue 4: November, 2003">Journal of Asian Studies</a>, <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/" title="Homepage at UPenn">David Ludden</a> reflects on the issue's articles in this way:

<quote>these articles both dovetail nicely with my concern for areas outside the reach of territorial authority or, in the case of Yunnan, partly in and partly out, which is the case for much of northeastern South Asia as well through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The vast interior mountain-valley-river-forest region that includes Yunnan could be conceptualized by both authors usefully as not lying essentially inside China at all but partly inside China and partly in wider geographies that the trade routes, religious routes, ethnic relations, linguistic evidence, and so on—not to mention opium itself and all of the smuggling—link to Central, South, West, and Southeast Asia. This is a wonderful area for doing connective work across “other geographies” than national states provide.</quote>

This will be a good way to approach the book we're reading this week for James Lee's class, an as-yet-unpublished work by <a href="http://www.southernct.edu/" title="Southern Connecticut State University homepage">David Bello</a> (also author of one of the <acronym title="Journal of Asian Studies">JAS</acronym> articles) on inland opium trade in XVIII and XIX century Asia.