Victor Segalen (1878, Brest - 1919) was a Poète, but also Médecin of marine, ethnographer and Archéologue French.

He was born the January 14th 1878 with Brest (street Massillon). After studies of medicine at the university of Bordeaux, the officer-doctor is affected in French Polynésie. He does not like the sea, nor to sail but unload and discover. He remains with Tahiti in 1903 and 1904. At the time of a stopover to the Marquesas Islands, it could buy the last sketches of Gauguin, deceased three months before its arrival, which without him would have left to the reject. It brings back in metropolis a novel, Unmemorable the (1907), a newspaper and tests on Gauguin and Rimbaud which will be published only in 1978.

In 1908, it decides to leave in China where it looks after the victims of the epidemic of plague of Mandchourie. In 1910, it decides to settle in China with his wife and her son. The first edition of Stèles is born with Beijing in 1912. He undertakes in 1914 an archaeological mission devoted to the monuments of the dynasty of the Han. This study on the Chinese sculptures will be published only in 1972 ( Grande Chinese Statuary ).

In China it met one of rare Europeans who were there then, and who marked it much, it was about the Belgian sinologist Charles Michel which inspired the character of Rene Leys to him.

He dies the May 21st 1919 in the forest of Huelgoat, Hamlet with the hand. Afterwards, the French state registered its name on the walls of the Pantheon as a " writer died for France during the war of 1914-1918".

The university of medicine of Bordeaux where Victor Segalen made his studies bears its name (Université Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2). The faculty of Letters and Social sciences of Brest, its birthplace, pays also homage to him while bearing its name.

Works

• has dreuz year Arvor , 1899.
• the medical observation in the writers naturalists , Thèse, Bordeaux, 1902. HTTP: /electronic gallica.bnf.fr/document?O=N106376 Document
• Unmemorable the , (under the pseudonym of max Anély), 1907.
• Steles , 1912.
• Paintings , Gallimard, 1916.

Posthumous publications

• Orphée-King , 1921.

• Rene Leys , 1922.
• archaeological Mission in China (in collaboration with Gilbert de Voisins and Jean Lartigue), 1923-1924.
• Equipped. From Beijing to the steps thibétaines. 1929.

See too

• List of the Breton authors

External bond

• Steles (full text)
• Steles 古今碑錄 (sinological full text and sources)
• Equipped (full text and biographical note)