François Marie Savina

François Marie Savina (20 March 1876 – 23 July 1941) was a Frenchman who worked as a Catholic priest and as an anthropologist. For an approximately forty-year period he worked in the Upper-Tonkin Vicariate, Hainan, and Laos. He studied the Hmong people of northern Vietnam and Laos as he was asked to spread Christianity to them. Nicholas Tapp, author of ''The Impossibility of Self: An Essay on the Hmong Diaspora'', described Savina as "One of our earliest informants who is at all frank about the nature of his day-today encounters with the Hmong". Charles Keith, author of ''Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation'', wrote that Savina was "[t]he most notable" missionary ethnographer of Southeast Asia of his era.

Tapp wrote that "Savina spoke Hmong but we do not know how much". Savina also had studied Chinese. Robert Entenmann, author of "The Myth of Sonom, the Hmong King," wrote that Savina "was unfamiliar with Chinese history and the subtleties of Chinese vocabulary". Provided by Wikipedia