Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

Heinrich Harrer was a remarkable man.  At the age of 36, he was part of the first expedition to successfully climb the north face of the Eiger, an adventure he recounted in his book The White Spider.  

The following year, 1939, he joined Peter Aufschnaiter, another Austrian mountaineer, in an expedition to what is now northern Pakistan.  Here, they were apprehended by the British authorities, and when war was declared between Britain and Germany, they became prisoners of war.  They were interred in several POW camps until they finally ended up in Dehradun, near the foothills of the Himalayas. In 1944, after several attempted escapes, Harrer and Aufschnaiter finally succeeded in crossing the frontier into Tibet, where they sought political asylum, and here they stayed until the Chinese invasion in 1950.

The first half of Seven Years in Tibet recounts the details of the escape attempts and the journey from Dehradun to the Tibetan capital Lhasa.  This part of the story is one of high adventure and derring-do.  The duo and their companions showed incredible ingenuity, skill and pragmatism both in the devising and execution of their escapes and in their journey on foot through the Tibetan Himalayas.  On their way to Lhasa, they encounter by turns much hospitality and hostility, including some close brushes with death. 

The second half of the book deals with Harrer and Aufschnaiter's years in Lhasa as guests of the 14th Dalai Lama and his administration.  This part of the tale is of a more sedate nature.  It mainly provides an ethnographic account of life in the Tibetan capital in the latter half of the 1940s, and recounts how the two Europeans were called on to undertake public engineering works.  With the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Harrer and Aufschaiter made their way into Nepal, to be followed shortly by the teenaged Dalai Lama as he began his long exile.  Harrer notes the invasion spelled the end of feudalism and the beginning of industrialisation in Tibet.

Seven Years in Tibet is well-written.  Throughout his compelling adventure narrative and his insightful account of a now-vanished way of life, Harrer never loses sight of the humanity of the Tibetans he encountered, and the warmth and affection he felt for the people is present on every page.

Harrer died in 2006, aged 93, having spent the intervening decades undertaking further adventures and bringing the plight of the Tibetan people to the attention of the world.