Armand David saw the deer over the wall of the Nanhaizi hunting park in 1866 and obtained specimens, giving science its first description of an animal that no longer existed outside that enclosure. Some individuals were subsequently sent to European collections.
The park herd was then lost, to flooding of the Yongding river and to the disorder around the Boxer Uprising at the turn of the twentieth century. The Duke of Bedford gathered the scattered European animals at Woburn Abbey, founding a herd from roughly eighteen deer. Every Pere David's deer alive descends from that group.
Returns to China began in 1985 and 1986, to Nanhaizi and to Dafeng in Jiangsu, and numbers now run into the thousands, with some herds free-ranging. The IUCN still lists the species as Extinct in the Wild, and the founder bottleneck leaves it with very low genetic diversity. Whether the reintroduced herds should count as wild is a live question of definition.