A blog entry on December 17 by one of the people who had met Grenot-Wang some years earlier, and greatly admired her work, alerted the wider world to her demise. Several other websites and media outlets picked up the account of her death from the blog 'Black and White Cat' by Robert Farr, a British journalist with CCTV9 in Beijing.

Grenot-Wang died eight days short of her 59th birthday, in a fire that engulfed the Sinologist's wooden three-storey house in Danian township; it had also served as a hostel for visitors interested in learning about Miao culture and supporting her work.

Investigations into the cause of the fire were ongoing, according to Xinhua.

Farr said that Grenot-Wang had arrived in Danian more than a decade ago after a chance meeting in a queue in Guilin .

'The person she met was a doctor working in Danian township for Medecins Sans Frontieres. They needed an interpreter. Francoise had been working as a tour guide for some time, but gladly took the chance to do something more meaningful.

'As soon as she arrived in Danian, she knew this was where her soul belonged.'

Fang Fang, as she became known locally, set up an organisation called Couleurs de Chine (Colours of China or CDC) in 1998 to help Miao girls get educated.

As the gravestone put up by local people noted, CDC had paid for 5,775 children to go to school, built 68 schools and dormitories, and provided a great deal of school equipment, at a total cost of more than 15.6 million yuan (HK$17.7 million).

'She had been shocked by the fact that little girls did not get any education,' said Jean-Philippe Beja, senior researcher with the Centre d'Etudes Francais sur la Chine Contemporaine (CEFC), a French think-tank based in Hong Kong. Noting her dedication, Professor Beja said: 'She could mobilise a lot of French people who helped fund her works.'

The key to success was her abundant charisma, according to one of her associates.

'She had this special aura that people who are not like others have, such that one could have followed her to the end of the world,' said Brigitte Reinaudo, honorary member of the CDC management council.

Grenot-Wang's focus was on girls but she helped many boys get an education, as well.

'The average annual income was 300 yuan and it cost about the same to send a child to school,' Farr told the South China Morning Post. 'If a family could scrape together enough money for the fees, it was spent on a son.

'Daughters worked in the fields and tended ducks and cows. If they ended up in factories, they could hardly speak Putonghua, let alone read it, making them one of the most vulnerable and exploited groups of people in the country.'

A CDC statement released on her death said: 'Where only a handful of girls managed to get to school, now everyone does. The most gifted even make it to university.'

Grenot-Wang encouraged them to return and work with their communities.

What were her motivations and politics, and what led to her single-minded dedication? While the French daily Le Monde reported that she had been close to the extreme left in her youth, Professor Beja, with whom she studied Chinese 40 years ago, disputed that. 'She was not very politicised,' he said.

However, it is a measure of her tenacity that despite initially facing accusations of spying and being banned from Danian, as she said in a talk to the CEFC in Hong Kong in September, she sneaked back into the area and eventually won the respect and support of the authorities.

Rather than criticising or confronting the central government over its failure to ensure non-discrimination and respect for the economic, social and cultural rights of the Miao people, Grenot-Wang chose to do her bit to right these imbalances on the ground.

'[At the time of her death] she had a surfeit of projects, as always,' Ms Reinaudo said. She was to have visited Macau to raise funds for CDC, as well as France and Singapore on speaking missions.

Six days before her death, she noted in her blog (fangfang.over-blog.com) that, since November, schoolchildren in the Rongshui and Sanjiang districts of Guangxi were entitled to a hot lunch costing no more than 2 yuan and subsidised by the government of nearby Liuzhou city . Even if it were mere noodle soup sipped out of a plastic bag, it was an improvement over the ball of cold, glutinous rice brought from home, which was all they had before.

Her passion extended to the culture of the Miao and other ethnic groups in southern China.

'She was determined that they should develop and escape grinding poverty, but equally determined that they should not lose the culture that had evolved over thousands of years, only to become sellers of trinkets for tourists,' Farr said on his blog. He said separately that CDC had helped restore important ethnic cultural buildings.

Grenot-Wang told the Hong Kong audience in September that, thanks to the steady migration of some Miao people towards Guangdong and other coastal provinces in search of work, their culture would not be passed on to succeeding generations and that efforts were needed to preserve it.

She wrote two books that testified to her expertise and her dedication to the minorities of southern China.

Au Coeur de la Chine: Une Francaise en Pays Miao (At China's Heart: A Frenchwoman in Miao Country) which appeared in 2007, was an ethnological work and a passionate account of a place and a people that preoccupied her.

Her Chine du Sud: La Mosaique des Minorites (Southern China: Mosaic of Minorities) first published in 2000 and revised in 2005, was a detailed look at 30 major ethnic groups in southern China, their history, customs, stories and cuisine. Earlier, she contributed to a travel guide on southwest China.

'In keeping with her wishes, Grenot-Wang was interred according to the rites of a culture she wanted to preserve, close to those she loved so much, the little girls she had helped go to school,' the CDC statement said. The ceremony, on December 20, was attended by hundreds of Miao people and officials, as well as some of her associates from France.

'Tears are also flowing in 30 countries where foster parents of the girls whose education is being sponsored through Couleurs de Chine live,' CDC said. She leaves behind two daughters and two grandchildren, according to Ms Reinaudo. Little is known of the Chinese husband from whom she had been divorced for many years.

Hundreds of messages of condolence from around the world have been posted on websites and blogs; the CDC site has been inundated.

'You spent your life concerned with the peasant masses, you devoted your life to so many children like me and you fussed over us like a mother,' said Yang Lihua, of Longpei village in Guangxi, in a posting.

'She gave up a comfortable situation to dedicate herself to the happiness of thousands of people who without her would never have had access to modernity, to knowledge and to the outside world,' said Dong Qiang, writer and Peking University professor, on behalf of himself and many others on the French embassy website in Beijing.

A measure of the regard she enjoyed, even in official circles, is that she had been made an honorary citizen of Liuzhou and received the French honour, Knight of the Order of Merit.

A CDC member, Marine Vitre, has been named to take Grenot-Wang's place.

'I don't doubt at all that they'll carry on doing a lot of good,' Farr said.

'Some things might be harder now, though. Francoise was directly and personally involved in every detail on the ground. She visited the family of every child, making sure everything was spent properly and kids really did go to school. A lot of the families are so poor, sometimes the kids drop out of classes for weeks or months to help earn short-term money, even if that means they lose out in the long term.'

Ms Reinaudo was emphatic that the work would continue.

'To honour her memory, but also because numerous young people still need CDC's help, there's no question of abandoning her work,' she said.

'Local authorities expressed their great sorrow during the obsequies for Francoise Grenot-Wang and have assured CDC of their support to carry on her work.'