Albert Gervais (called Jen-I-Kouan in Chinese) was a French military doctor. He was born in Marseille (France) in 31 December 1891 but his birth was officially declared the next day to gain a year. He died in Nice (France) the night of 25-26 November 1979. Taken between 1919 and 1925, his photographs document chiefly Sichuan province in Western China. Gervais was based in Chengdu, where he worked in a hospital managed by French missionaries while teaching Western Medicine to Chinese students. Back in France, he published several novels and journal articles about his personal experience in China.
Today, Albert Gervais’ granddaughter (the independent journalist Aurore Staiger) holds and has been gathering information about this archive since 2015. She runs a blog in which she gives a fictional voice to Albert Gervais himself, as if he told directly the reader about his peregrination across China. This enables Staiger to shed light on specific documents from the archive (photographs, publications, letters…) in a discursive manner.
