Imprimerie de la Société des Missions-Etrangères

Second edition, illustrated with 13 full-page plates printed on various tinted backgrounds. The first edition was published in 1924.

This edition includes a map that was not reissued in the second printing.

The Miao people (known as Méo in Vietnam and Hmong in Laos) are an ethnic group found in southern China and northern Indochina. They speak various loosely related dialects, but without mutual intelligibility.

Today, they are generally regarded not as a single ethnic group but as a broader grouping of distinct peoples. A missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, François-Marie Savina (1876–1941) worked in Upper Tonkin, Hainan (China), and Laos from 1901 to...

Second edition, partly original as revised and expanded.

Cordier, Sinica, cites the first edition (col. 1625).

Contemporary half black calf, smooth spine decorated with double gilt fillets, gilt date at foot, marbled paper boards, green endpapers and pastedowns, wrappers and spine preserved, modern binding signed Boichot. 

Study of the Pounti dialect, or Cantonese, widespread in Kouangtong, spoken in part of Kouangsi, and by a large number of Chinese emigrants. 

Stamp of the "Foyer des étudiants d'Extrême-Orient" in Bourg-la-Reine on the front free endpaper. 

A dampstain to the foot of the very last leaves. a few small foxing spots, wrappers preserved...

Very rare first edition of the earliest French–Annamite vocabulary (see Cordier, Indosinica IV, 2287–2288).

Contemporary modest binding in brown half sheepskin, flat spine lacking at foot, partially covered with a handwritten label—partially torn—bearing the author's name and title; marbled paper-covered boards, pink endpapers.

Scuffing; boards and endpapers renewed.

On the origins of printing in Bangkok (1839), see Michael Winship, "L’imprimerie thaïlandaise : des origines à 1851," in: Le livre et l’imprimerie en Extrême-Orient et en Asie du Sud, 1986, pp. 265–280.

A wide-margined copy enriched with numerous early handwritten annotations in black and...