The Siege of Shangri-La: The Quest for Tibets Sacred Hidden Paradise
by By McRae, Michael J.
Category: History , Asia , General

At the far eastern end of the Himalayas in Tibet lies the Tsangpo River Gorge, known as "the great romance of geography" during the nineteenth century's golden age of exploration. Here the mighty Tsangpo funnels into an impenetrable canyon three miles deep, walled off from the outside world by twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks. Like the earthly paradise of Shangri-La immortalized in James Hilton's classic 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the Tsangpo Gorge is a refuge revered for centuries by Tibetan Buddhists - and later in the Western imagination - as a sanctuary in times of strife as well as a gateway to nirvana.The Siege of Shangri-La tells the story of this fabled land's exploration as both a geographical and a spiritual destination - and chronicles the discovery at the end of the millennium of the truth behind the myths and rumors about it. Veteran journalist Michael McRae traces the gorge's exploratory history from the clandestine missions of surveyor-spies called pundits and the horticultural expeditions of naturalists in the early twentieth century to the recent investigations of scholars, adventurers, and pilgrims seeking the gorge's physical and metaphysical nucleus: the "Hidden Falls" of the Tsangpo.