About the Author

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Alfred Raquez (Author) 'Alfred Raquez' was the pseudonym of Joseph Gervais, a bankrupt French lawyer who fled to the Far East in the late 1890s and had access to some of the powerful players in French Indochina. He wrote prolifically about China and Indochina, took some of the earliest photographs of Laos and made the earliest field sound recordings in that land. He died under mysterious circumstances in Marseille in 1907. Confidence man, daring explorer, dashing bon vivant, proto-photojournalist and amateur ethnographer in equal parts, Raquez offers one of the more intriguing voices (not to mention mystery-filled yarns) of any commentator on the mix of ambitions and follies of of European colonial expansion into the Far East.William L. Gibson (Editor, Translator) William L. Gibson is a writer, researcher andoccasional sound artist based in SoutheastAsia. With a PhD in literature from theUniversity of Leeds, he is also the author of atrilogy of hard-boiled crime fiction set in 1890sSingapore and Malaya.Paul Bruthiaux (Editor, Translator) A prolific academic author and editor with aPhD in linguistics from the University ofSouthern California, French-born PaulBruthiaux now lives in Thailand. His memoir, French Bred: Growing Up Provincial in a BygoneFrance, was published in 2012. Paul Bruthiaux taught linguistics in universities in California, Texas, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand. He is now a language consultant, editor, and translator and lives in Chiang Mai.