At the heart of the 19th century, as the European powers sought to extend their influence in Asia, an exemplary figure stood out for his courage, his erudition and his decisive role in colonial and scientific history: Ernest Marie Louis de Gonzague Doudart de Lagrée.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, amid the turmoil of colonial conquests and the exploration of distant lands, a remarkable figure emerged, who was in turn a soldier, linguist, explorer and scholar: Étienne François Aymonier (1844-1929). A man of many talents, he was the first scientist to methodically survey the ruins and decipher the inscriptions of the ancient Khmer kingdom—now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam—and to study the little-known Cham civil

Born in 1859 in the hamlet of Arbarella, on the rugged and proud island of Corsica, Jules Agostini grew up in fin-de-siècle France, with a vivid imagination for distant lands and the strangeness of other places.