Peter Goullart (1901-1978) wasn’t the first outsider to discover the charms of Lijiang in China’s southwestern Yunnan province. And if the crowds of tourists that thronged the destination when I last visited over Spring Festival were any indication, he won’t be the last.
Jade Dragon Snow Mountain towers above cobbled streets, visible from almost every section of the old town. Wild rivers cascade down nearby slopes and through the surrounding valley and villages. At 8,000 feet【2 438 m】 in elevation — but on the same latitude as Florida and Saudi Arabia — Lijiang’s natural bounty has for centuries supported diverse communities, including the Nakhi ethnic group (sometimes Sinicized as “Naxi”).
It was here, among the Nakhi people, that Goullart — born in Russia, but raised in exile in Paris and then Shanghai after his family fled the Bolshevik revolution — finally found a home. Goullart arrived in Lijiang in 1942 to organize small-scale rural enterprises as part of the Kuomintang government’s Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement, and lived there until 1949 when he once again was forced to flee a revolution, as the Chinese Communist Party and their supporters began asserting control.
In 1955 Goullart published The Forgotten Kingdom, a memoir of his time in Yunnan. It is both a personal reflection of Goullart’s efforts to become part of the Lijiang community, and also includes chapters that are more ethnographies of the Nakhi and the other groups in northern Yunnan, as well as descriptions of Lijiang and the surrounding area.