‘Alfred Raquez’ was the pseudonym of Joseph Gervais, a bankrupt French lawyer who fled to the Far East in the late 1890s. He wrote prolifically about Indochina and took some of the earliest photographs and field sound recordings in Laos. He died under mysterious circumstances in Marseille in 1907. Confidence man, intrepid 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 European colonial expansion into the Far East.