His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist and a constant traveler and explorer who wrote treatises on the insects of Africa and had an encyclopedic range of interests.

He spent the years 1889–1891 in Indochina, then a French colony, as well as in Japan, but mainly in China, where he served on the gunboat Aspie, which cruised the Yangtze River.

de Saussure argued that both the French and Spanish empires would dissolve because they did not recognize the unbridgeable divisions between the superior and lower races, while his linguist brother did not view racial differences as absolute or predetermined.

[4] In the years from 1899 to 1922, de Saussure published dozens of articles, especially in the Paris journal T'oung Pao, the leading outlet for sinology in Europe.

Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese science, calls Saussure's long series of papers "still indispensable" and says that he possessed "considerable sinological knowledge," though not as much as some.