In 1919, 41-year-old Victor Segalen was found dead in a Breton forest, a copy of Shakespeare beside him, the pages opened to "Hamlet." Thus ended the life of a writer whom many regarded as an enigma. Some also thought him a suicide. Among these was Paul Claudel, but then the Catholic author and diplomat had reason to think so since Segalen had some time before rejected his offer of spiritual aid.
This had been in China, where Claudel was at the French Embassy and Segalen was having as little as possible to do with colonial France. His reason was that governments usually try (for their own political ends) to reduce cultural differences and Segalen was interested in the benefit of such differences -- the more extreme the better.
He had earlier traveled to Polynesia to visit the artist Paul Gauguin, and had written about Abyssinia and the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Finally, in 1909, he arrived in Beijing and stayed there for a time. In these exotic climes Segalen found what he called "an inexhaustible, boundless diversity."