Seeing Sri Lanka from Within: Jacques Christian Soulié’s Lasting Legacy

Did you know that our co-founder, Jacques Soulié (1939–2025), once published a tourist guide to Sri Lanka?

When Guides Mondeos commissioned him to write the book, he had already been living on the island for five years—and had been deeply familiar with its history and culture for over a decade.

Now out of print, the guide has acquired an almost archaeological quality, bearing witness to a Sri Lanka seen with patience, intimacy, and care.

Below is the beautiful afterword he wrote—a genuine tribute to his country of adoption.
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"Jacques Christian Soulié, a psychiatrist and writer in his spare time, has been living in Sri Lanka for six years. After travelling through various regions of the world, and at the conclusion of his clinical career in France, he chose Sri Lanka— a country he had been getting to know for nearly twenty years— as a new chapter in his life.

Teaching Psychology and French at the University of Peradeniya, he discovers a little more each day the natural beauty and cultural richness of a country that has become his own, and which he hopes to share with as many people as possible."