Introduction / Clara Wing-chung Ho -- Chronologies of ancient China : a critique of the "Xia-Shang-Zhou chronology" project / Edward L. Shaughnessy -- The politics of imperial collecting in the northern Song period / Patricia Buckley Ebrey -- Who is responsible for the limits of Jesuit scientific and technical transmission from Europe to China in the eighteenth century? / Benjamin A. Elman -- Marriages, births, and deaths in the lower Yangzi Valley during the later eighteenth century / Mark Elvin and Josephine Fox -- Why women were not a problem in nineteenth-century Chinese thought / Susan Mann.