A French novelist’s road trip through colonial Indochina

Roland Dorgelès was a French novelist, and here he becomes a traveller, journeying through France’s colony in Indochina and leaving the main routes between its cities. He writes about the people he met, the religious sites he visited, the landscapes he crossed and the craftsmen he watched at work, in northern and central Vietnam and in Cambodia.

It is a European’s view, written from inside the colonial order, and today it reads as a historical document as much as a travel book: a picture of the region under French rule, as one French visitor saw it. Black-and-white photographs of places, people and crafts run all through it.

This English version was published by the Century Company in New York and London in 1926, and bibliographies report it as the first American printing. The bright orange pictorial cloth is still lively, with rubbing at the corners, along the spine and at its head and foot, and some foxing in the front pages; there is no dust jacket.