"Foreigners were a novelty then, and they only appeared in summer. They brought delicious food and fun toys. How could the children not remember them vividly?"
These fragmented oral accounts piece together a picture of a real, equal, playful neighborly relationship between foreigners and locals in Kuliang.
After 2019, Guo's fieldwork evolved into a trans-Pacific "digital archaeology" project. He connected with Lin Yinan, an associate professor at the Shanghai East China University of Science and Technology, and Elyn MacInnis, whose father-inlaw was a missionary who once dreamed of building a home in Kuliang and whose brother-in-law flew with the Flying Tigers in China.
MacInnis would sift through faded family albums in the US; Lin would comb through archival documents in Shanghai; and Guo would conduct on-site "verification" in Kuliang's forests.
Trust was built slowly. With the high-resolution historical photos, Guo says he could quickly identify where they were taken, thanks to both his intimate familiarity with every inch of his hometown and a drone.
The drone's first major success was locating the site of a mysterious 1903 photograph of a dinner party hosted by Samuel Gracey, then US consul to China, to celebrate his 69th birthday.
For years, no one knew its location, with only a building's side and a distant mountain as clues. Guo searched the mountains repeatedly.
"Suddenly, one day on my scooter, I glanced at the mountain opposite, and it looked familiar. Inspiration struck, just like that," he recalls.
Finally, the drone confirmed the precise spot amid overgrown ruins.
The most poignant location hunt was for the plot of land called Skye, purchased in 1948 by MacInnis' in-laws for a villa they never built.
With only one old photo and vague descriptions, Guo used his drone to scour the wooded hills, eventually pinpointing the long-overgrown foundation.
"She called her husband, Peter, right then. Before dialing, she told us, 'Peter will be annoyed at first, but then he'll be overjoyed'," Guo shares.
