We make mistakes, and when we do the chagrin spreads far and wide at Berkshire. Some of us are compulsive about style and spelling. Others are fact-checking neatnicks. And still others (I name no names) are casual about spelling and dangling modifiers, but nonetheless care intensely about the accuracy of what we publish.

We’ll be publishing a list of errata for each issue, but one error deserves mention here because it made us aware that as steeped as we are in things Chinese and Asian, an out-of-date fact (or map detail) can slip past us. In issue 1, “The China Threat?,” we included a map with a caption listing countries bordering China and included Macau in that list. But Macau, a former Portugese colony, is, like Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. As the CIA World Factbook: Macau explains: “Macau became the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China on 20 December 1999. China has promised that, under its ‘one country, two systems’ formula, China’s socialist economic system will not be practiced in Macau, and that Macau will enjoy a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign and defense affairs for the next 50 years.”

Hong Kong, formerly a British colony, became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) on 1 July 1997.

We were correct, however, elsewhere in the issue, when we contrasted the United States’s having two bordering countries, Canada and Mexico, with China’s fourteen.