In the years 1936-37 Bernatzik traveled in both Southern and Northern Thailand and the southern fringe of the Shan State, with a final excursion into Vietnam. In his book he gave interesting accounts of the ethnic groups he visited, Moken, Akha, Lisu, Biet and others, all documented with outstanding photographs of lasting historical value. The volume is on an enigmatic and notoriously shy hunter-gatherer tribe called 'the Spirits of the Yellow Leaves'. This ethnic group still exists both in Thailand and Laos, though it numbers only some 300 people. It is nowadays referred to as the 'Yellow-Leaf People' or as Mlabri (Mla' Bri', literally: 'forest people'). The name derives from their practice of constructing temporary leaf shelters and abandoning them as the foliage withered, leaving behind "yellow leaves" as a marker of their passage.

Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (1897–1953), an Austrian ethnologist and photographer, documents their nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life, spiritual beliefs, and physical appearance through detailed observation and striking black-and-white photographs. First published in German in 1951 under the title Die Geister der gelben Blätter, this 1958 English edition provides a rare, if controversial, window into a people on the brink of disappearance due to encroaching modernization and deforestation. 

56 pages of black & white photos.

1958, London, Robert Hale Limited, hardcover, blue cloth, 222 pp., in a good condition.