Forgotten Kingdom: Lijiang and the Naxi People

"Goullart was a White Russian exile who was raised in China. His mother fled Russia when he was four or five and he grew up speaking Chinese. He became a very passionate Taoist and also a big believer in ghosts and other supernatural beings. He went to work in Lijiang, a big Yunnanese city where all these minorities mixed. The Naxi were the main one, but lots of little groups came into town to trade, to gossip, to tell stories. He was working there for the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, which were a form of microfinance run by the KMT. He arrived in the mid-1930s and was working mostly with women, the main partners in these schemes. He was giving them loans and helping them come together. I wanted to finish on this book because I think it’s one of the most beautiful and productive images of minority life in China. Lijiang is this big trading, storytelling town where people are sitting down together, doing business, talking. He has this real sense of love for the place, for all these different peoples and for how dynamic it is. I imagine it must be a little exaggerated — he does mention fighting and banditry too. But there’s this image of people coming together to make something bigger than themselves and not defined by any one group. This is the absolute best of what ethnic identity in China is about. The Maoists destroyed all the things that mattered to Lijiang and the Naxi. The festivals, the shrines, the stories, the trading, all of that was anathema to Maoist ideology of what a nation should be. It was wiped out as much as they could. They really shattered this dynamic place. People nowadays, many of them on the Han side, are trying to reconstruct and reimagine it. You have no one dominant group. The Naxi are the most powerful group but they’re not the only game in town. I think the role of trade was important. When you’re doing this kind of small-scale trade it’s hugely conducive to cultural exchange. Also, female dominance helped. Women ran the trade and the bars. The young men in their twenties, who are most susceptible to hard interpretations of identities, were sidelined. I think older women in particular tend to have smarter or more flexible senses of what these identities can be."