Tibet

An excellent coffee-table-type photographic account of Tibet. The cover is Tsaparang. There is a 22-page section on Mount Kailash, and a 24-page section on the Guge Kingdom and Tsaparang and Tholing. There is an introduction by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, another introduction by Robert Thurman, and brief overviews of each photographic area of Tibet in the book. There are some photos of Gyantse, Tingri, and Lhasa, among the other parts of Tibet.

Ever since I was a child I have wanted to travel to Tibet, sadly I have only travelled to Ladakh and Nepal as a second best. This book gives me inspiration. Sadly, no book can ever remotely represent the majesty of the Himalayas, but this book does capture some of the essence. I look forward to the day when I stand at even one of the locations in this book and think back to when I dreamed.....

This stunning volume is the most moving pictorial of Western Tibet's landscape and people that I have seen (and I have seen a LOT of Tibet books). I am grateful to the photographer for preserving on film the remnants of Tsaparang's marvellous Buddha figures, most of which were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. I journeyed to Tsaparang and Kailash in 1998. It felt like the edge of the world, and like crossing a great rift in time back to an earlier age. Sitting down with this book (and Govinda's out of print 'Tibet in Pictures', which has photos from 1948) I can almost smell the clean desert air again, and taste the dust which blows forever through, and beyond, the joy and sadness in Tibet.