Initiated by Catholic missionaries who came to settle in remote territories in southwestern China in the 18th century, the study of the Yi ethnic group, its language and culture, by French people reached its peak between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Mostly missionaries, explorers, diplomats, linguists, or doctors, our research focuses on about thirty French people who wrote books and articles on the Yi, studied their language, published grammar manuals, bilingual Yi-French lexicons and dictionaries, and for some of them photographed the Yi populations and their living environment. As a result, many French institutions now preserve original Yi manuscripts, as well as documentary and photographic collections of inestimable value for anthropological research on the Yi ethnic group and knowledge of its intangible cultural heritage. These museums, libraries, archives and research institutes are thus custodians of an exceptional cultural heritage shared between France and China. This notion of shared intangible cultural heritage makes it possible to considerably broaden the field of possibilities of anthropological research, especially if this sharing is based on strategic partnerships between local and foreign research institutions. Thus, through transnational research projects based on programs of digitization, translation and, where necessary, restoration of available resources, intangible cultural heritage is placed at the service of anthropology and anthropological research opens up a better understanding of intangible cultural heritage. In this perspective, Sino-French academic cooperation should be strengthened for the anthropological study of the Yi ethnic group in the short, medium and long term, in a way that opens the doors to a new type of cross-disciplinary academic Yi studies.