In his youth, Pyotr Gular fled to China from the October Revolution and lived in the countries of the East until the end of his days. As a traveler, he became famous for his exploration of distant and unexplored (from the point of view of a European of the mid-20th century) corners of the Asian world, and as a writer, for his amazing books about these lands. His main and most famous work is about the ancient kingdom of Lijiang, hidden in the mountains on the border of Tibet and the Chinese province of Yunnan. There, Gular lived and worked for nine years among local peoples and tribes, about which even their closest neighbors, the Chinese, knew almost nothing. Unique ethnographic data, presented simply and expressively, allows us to see with our own eyes a beautiful mysterious place that the author dearly loved and seriously considered heaven on earth. In 1949, he was expelled from paradise, but in The Forgotten Kingdom, Gular preserved Lijiang for posterity as it was before the advent of the communists. And thanks to this book, the old Lijiang can still be found.