November 1911. A steamship, the Armand-Béhic, glides up the brown waters of the Saigon River and docks in the sticky heat of the coming dry season. Down the gangway steps a thirty-nine-year-old man, a lawyer by training and a journalist by temperament, arriving to take charge of one of the largest and most coveted territories in the French colonial empire. His name is Albert Sarraut.