Gontran de Poncins

Educated by clerics on the family estate until age fourteen, he followed the usual aristocratic path to military school and, finally, Saint Cyr, the French equivalent of West Point.

He joined the Paris École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and painted there for six years, then entered an Italian silk concern and rose to become its manager in London.

Upon his return from the Arctic, Poncins submitted well over a thousand pages of notes in French and English to an editor at Time-Life Books.

"[4] In 1955 he moved to the Sun Wah hotel in Cholon in South Vietnam, keeping an illustrated journal which was published as From a Chinese City (1957).

"He chose Cholon, the Chinese riverbank community snuggled up to Saigon, because he suspected the ancient customs of a national culture endure longer in remote colonies than in the motherland.