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Then & NowPeter Goullart, the White Russian writer for whom China became a spiritual home

Hong Kong provided temporary refuge for the author, who arrived in 1949 after the communists assumed power in China, before he relocated in Malaya and eventually settled in Singapore

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Peter Goullart on horseback, in Lijiang, in the 1940s.

Published: 11:45am, 7 Jun 2019Updated: 12:15pm, 7 Jun 2019

Immediately after the communists assumed power in China in 1949, Hong Kong provided a temporary refuge for émigré Western sinologues – along with nearly two million Chinese – displaced by years of civil war and consequent political changes. Many stayed in the colony just long enough to catch their breath while waiting for the revolutionary dust to settle. All soon realised that the China they once knew and loved no longer existed, and what had replaced it wanted no part of them, so most moved on elsewhere.

British Buddhist scholar John Blofeld, who had lived in Hong Kong in the 1930s, decamped to a university teaching post in Thailand, in 1951; Eurasian author Han Suyin, whose autobiographical novel A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) vividly captures much of this atmosphere, remarried and went to Malaya, in 1952, but returned periodically, and became a leading apologist for the Chinese communist regime.

Another temporary sojourner was Peter Goullart. His father had been a St Petersburg tea merchant with – unsurprisingly, given the commodity he dealt in – extensive business contacts in China. Like most affluent, Tsarist-era Russians, the family were culturally Europeans, spoke French at home and took holidays in Italy, France, England and Germany. His father’s connections aided Goullart and his mother when, like tens of thousands of other White Russian émigrés, they fled from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and arrived in China, virtually penniless.

With few marketable skills beyond a friendly manner, fluency in several European languages and, before long, spoken and written Chinese, Goullart worked for the American Express travel company for most of the 1920s and 30s, as a tour guide-interpreter. In the course of his work, he travelled the length and breadth of China, as well as Japan, Korea and the Philippines. As deeper personal connections with China, its peoples and their language evolved, Goullart became a practising Taoist.

British civil servant and author Austin Coates, in 1977. Photo: SCMP

The Monastery of Jade Mountain (1961), which documents the author’s personal journey, remains a classic memoir of interwar China, far removed from the superficially Westernised treaty-port world inhabited by most resident foreigners. Several years spent during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-45) in a remote corner of Yunnan, near Lijiang, where he helped establish industrial cooperatives, inspired two memorable travel accounts, Forgotten Kingdom (1955) and Princes of the Black Bone (1959).