In the early 1960s a rumour circulated through China that one of its soldiers in Tibet had been brutally fed to the vultures. Xinran was a little girl and the tale frightened her. She knew nothing of the Tibetan custom of Sky burial. Thirty years later, she met the woman who could tell her the story that lay behind the legend. In 1958, when Wen was twenty-six, she and her husband Kejun were medical students fired with the hope and enthusiasm of the early Communist years. Kejun joined the army as a doctor. Only a few months after her marriage, Wen learned that her husband had been killed in action in Tibet. Refusing to believe this, she too joined the army as a doctor and set out for Tibet to search for him. She became separated from her regiment, and spent years wandering. Thirty years later she found out what had happened to her husband. She returned to China to find a country transformed. But she, too, was transformed: in China she had strived to a material goal; in Tibet she had found a new spirituality

Published:2004

No. pages: 164

ISBN: 9780701176228

Condition: VERY GOOD - hardcover with dustjacket - 360g