Six Favourite Books: Tibet

Read time 5 mins

Journeys to and from the Western world’s favourite land of magic and mystery

Tibetan Foothold

Dervla Murphy

This book follows on from Full Tilt, which describes Murphy's journey to India on a bicycle. It is 1963, and she is working in a refugee camp for Tibetans flooding over the border into Northern India. Murphy's love for the Tibetans and their children or "Tiblets" as she calls them, shows through. Tibetan Foothold is a powerful memoir that witnesses the struggle for Tibetan resiliency in the years following the Annexation of Tibet.

To a Mountain in Tibet

Colin Thubron

To a Mountain in Tibet is Colin Thubron’s 10th travel book and chronicles his journey on foot to Mount Kailash through remote regions of Nepal and Tibet. Thubron shares more personal information in this book – describing his inner journey of coming to terms with the death of his mother, whose passing prompted this adventure. His prose, as always, is immaculate.

The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen

The Snow Leopard is an account of Matthiessen’s two-month search for the rarely seen Snow Leopard with naturalist George Schaller in the Dolpo region on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas. The book is a beguiling mix of Zen Buddhism, travel, and nature writing that I found hard to put down.

Magic and Mystery in Tibet

Alexandra David–Neel

Alexandra David-Neel was the first European woman to enter the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in 1924. She received teachings from the Dalai Lama and recorded esoteric events such as Tibetan mystics who could live naked in temperatures below freezing and monks who could defy gravity. The matter-of-fact way that she writes makes her astonishing assertions believable.

From a Mountain In Tibet:
A Monk’s Journey

Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche

This book tells the story of Lama Yeshe, a boy who grew up in rural Tibet and didn't see a car until he was fifteen. In the wake of the deadly Tibetan Uprising, he escaped to India through the Himalayas as one of only 13 survivors out of 300 refugees. The book chronicles the ups and downs of his momentous life - from experiencing excesses in America to his life now a monastery in Scotland. A gripping read.

Seven Years in Tibet

Heinrich Harrer.

Recounts how the author, an Austrian, escaped from an English internment camp in India in 1943 and spent the next seven years in Tibet. While the writing of this book is nothing spectacular, it is an amazing travelogue of Heinrich Harrier's 1000-mile journey to Tibet and his eventual friendship with his Holiness the Dalai Lama. The book was made into a film of the same name.

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