Victor SEGALEN (1878-1919). L.A.S. "Max-Anély", Tientsin 20 October 1911, to Charles Régismanset 5 pages and a half in-4, cartouche with Chinese ideograms at the head of the 1st page. Very interesting letter from China. He has read Charles Régismanset's (1873-1935) book L'Exotisme: la littérature coloniale (in collaboration with Louis Cario, Mercure de France, 1911): "It is a beautiful spectacle, &, for me, a precious shortcut. It will become my good pilot on journeys that are dear to us". He agreed with all the ideas in the book, except one, "which is the very idea of the book: to reserve the word exoticism for ethnic and geographical exoticism alone, and to pair it with the term colonial". This excellent essay helped him clarify a difficult chapter he was working on, and Segalen asked his friend for his opinion "as a predecessor, philosopher and artist". He changed his original title, L'Exotisme, esthétique du Divers, to : De l'Exotisme comme une esthétique du Divers. What Régismanset had written about him filled Segalen with joy and touched him deeply, and he himself admitted that he had always "sincerely believed that I had marked a step, given a note", with some proud cynicism... Finally, he shares his thoughts on the two years he spent in China: "Exoticism here is not just written. It is lived. We are in the midst of a Chinese revolution. I use this term because it is pitifully accurate. There are not two parties: the dynasty and the mass murderers or the madmen. There is the dynasty and the ragheads of our revolutionaries of yesteryear. On the one hand, in Peking, a worm-eaten but solid tradition of four thousand years & the admirable fiction of the power of the Son of Heaven. On the other, fifty-year-old schoolchildren, some of them doctors of medicine or agriculture, and fifteen-year-old schoolchildren, the "new China". - Between the two, an enormous mass "as powerless as the sea to foresee its turbulence", as the powerful Claudel (more or less) put it [...] Some proclaim: "a progressive & socialist Republic", others repeat: "the high & pure Sovereign Heaven". I must admit that Form and Power do not go hand in hand. The Court is weak, hesitant, elusive"... The Regent is young, "worried, anxious, nervous & gentle"... Segalen asked to serve as private physician to Generalissimo Yuan-Che K'ai, "the last of the great Chinese captains, from the line of city-takers and rebellion crushers"...