Dr. Caroline Poiron, an expert in ancient Chinese manuscripts, toiled in virtual anonymity in her remote office at the Ecole Normale Sup rieur. Her life changed in the course of a single day when she found a fragment of a codex long-thought to be a hoax: the Qiu Codex. After six months of painstaking translation and decryption, she found herself in a hidden Buddhist temple in the remote Kingdom of Bhutan, where she carefully removed a casket bearing...