Heinrich Harrer (1952 [1994] [2005]) Seven Years in Tibet translated from the German by Richard Graves.

Seven Years in Tibet is a boy-own adventure with Brad Pitt playing Heinrich Harrer (I wasn’t available). Having being brought up with Escape from Colditz and Steve McQueen on a motorbike jumping over barbed wire in The Great Escape (on every Christmas) I had to keep reminding myself Harrer wasn’t British. He was a national champion Austrian skier and mountain climber who scaled the North face of the Eiger. One of the few members of the SA and SS, perhaps the only officer, to have his picture taken with Adolf Hitler and the Dalai Lama.  A remarkable man.

The British treated their German prisoners well. A bit too well, I thought. German Generals were given an allowance based on their rank. This allowed Harrer and a General to purchase supplies and aided their escape when outside the camp.

Harrer and his later compatriot, a German agricultural engineer, learned how to speak Tibetan, mainly in peasant dialect, which amused the aristocracy, when they reached Lhasa, the Holy City over 1000 kms from their starting point. An incredible feat of endurance and cunning.

The Holy City was protected from foreign travellers (apart from the British stationed there) by a simple system. No food or aid was given to those making the journey. The enormous distances (larger than Germany and France combined) and among the largest mountain on Earth with climate extremes to match meant very few succeeded.

Having reached the capital the bedraggled visitors were feted. With those that aided them, often inadvertently, punished.

The Dalai Lama is described as a God/King. He is both. Venerated and lawmaker. Herrer got to meet him and tutor the Supreme Being after making friends with the Dalai Lama’s brother.

The Dalai Lama writes in the preface a message about those days, ‘how we remember those days we spent together in a happy country’.

Harrer tends to see things in the same way. People were happy but poor. Well, apart from the aristocracy that was corrupt, rich and happy. And the monasteries that ran the country which were richest of all and the most conservative of all.  Women were happy because they got to buy so many nice things. Nobody starved or ate meat or fish or any living things without a dispensation from the monks. Almost 3 million vegans troubled Harrer. He saw it as part of their backward thinking.

The death sentence wasn’t possible for religious reason. But if a criminal was whipped to death that was different. An accident almost.

China’s invasion was framed as liberation. The riches of the monasteries taken and shut. Over a million killed (a third of a sparsely populated country).

More Chinese than Tibetans live in Lhasa. ‘Perhaps only two percent of the old Lhasa I know still stands’.

Harrer died aged 93 in 2006 and preached for liberation of Tibet. Without Divine Inspiration the world’s number two superpower—soon to be number one—remains unmoved in a world we might no longer exist on.

The 14^th Dalai Lama may well be the last. No more Incarnations. Watch this space, or that space, or wherever sphere such things happen or matter?