George Coedes is well known as the great historian and epigraphist of south-East Asia. For this book, Les peuples de la peninsule Indochinoise, the professor comments in his introduction that in the past 10 years historical books on South-East Asia and especially on Indochina have been mostly devoted to the events after the 15th century A.D. Nearly all of them have only a brief resume of the events of the earlier 1,500 years. He therefore wrote this book to balance the two periods but deals only with Indochina, excluding the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia.