About the book (from jacket flap):
From the Land of Lost Content may well be the last book to describe the Tibet of old – that remote and romantic land before ten years of Chinese oppression drove the inhabitants to revolt and the Dalai Lama to exile.
There follows a vivid account of armed resistance in Lhasa. Not all Tibetans were heroes, some even turned traitor. But where heroism was needed it was found, as in the cases of an elderly hunchback who, single-handed, kept three mortars firing at a large force of Chinese – and lived to get away; or the party who fought off the armoured pursuers trying to head off the Dalai Lama at the river crossing, beyond which lay India and safety.
Noel Barber interviewed scores of survivors all over the world who were lucky enough to escape, among whom were the Dalai Lama himself, together with members of his government and retinue. It is on their eye-witness accounts that Noel Barber’s dramatic reconstruction is based.
