ISBN: 9780007177554    Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Year of publishing: 2004     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 320        Language: English

He finds a land with a long, warlike past and a complex interlocking relationship with China. He meets victims and perpetrators of Mao's Cultural Revolution, and young nuns who continue the fight against Communist rule. He stays in the tents of nomads, and hears first-hand accounts of the hopeless battle against overwhelmingly superior Chinese forces which ended, in a single day, a way of life which had endured for thousands of years. On his journey, Patrick French is continually sidetracked by a cascade of information, thoughts and reflections on such subjects: as how to blind a cabinet minister using a yak's knucklebones, the correct method of travelling across a desert by night, and the reasons for the Dalai Lama's transformation into 'an unknown dark-brown bird, bigger than a normal raven'. Patrick French has found a new way of writing about a place and its history. He fascinatingly illuminates one of the most persistently troubling of international issues, and confirms his reputation as one of the finest writers at work today.
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Patrick French's first book, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize. For his second, Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division, he was named the 1998 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Patrick French is a director of Free Tibet campaign, and a former editor of Tibet News.
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