Return to Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, translated from the German by Ewald Osers
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (first published in German 1983) ISBN 014007774X
About eighteen months ago I read Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet and enjoyed it very much, so when I came across this book I thought I'd give it a go. While it was an interesting read, it is not nearly as good as the first book, and given the way it was written, it was never going to be so.
In the early 1980s, when China's Tibet policy had thawed somewhat, Harrer was able to revisit the country he'd spent time in during the 1940s. It's unclear how long he was there, but it was as part of a guided tour at a time when tourism was just beginning in Tibet, and only limited numbers of foreigners were allowed in. Return to Tibet is a book formed around this visit - it is mostly a comparison of what he saw and experienced when he lived there, to what he's seeing and hearing now (in 1982) with his own eyes, and through the testimony of the Dalai Lama and his circle in Darjeeling.
What Harrer sees and hears appalls him. In particular, the destruction of most of the religious buildings he views as a great tragedy. Those temples and palaces that remain are also a sad sight for him, as he remembers the vibrancy and life that used to thrum through these great buildings when the Dalai Lama ruled his country. He tries to pick his way through the curtain that the Chinese try to draw over the real state of Tibet and its people. He wanders markets replete with Yak meat and butter, but is told by his old friends that in the countryside people are starving. He sees workmen "repairing" temples when he walks past with his group, but when he returns unexpectedly later, they have gone. He is told that temples have many monks, but he sees no sign of permanent residency. Those monks he does see he is tempted to believe are actually just workers dressed in the appropriate gear.
He tells of repression and unlawful executions, but Harrer also shows the reader how the religious life of Tibet has continued despite Chinese attempts to extinguish it. He is constantly pressed by Tibetans for pictures of the Dalai Lama, and does in fact see some on public display, which heartens him to think that perhaps the Chinese really were going down a new path and letting Tibetans express their culture more freely. His postscript, which reports on the 1983 crackdown on Tibet, validated the views of many Tibetans he spoke to that thought that the loosening of Chinese repression was only temporary.
The value in this book is that it is a report on Tibet from someone who knew what it used to be like. While Harrer is not rosy-eyed about the past, what he shows us is how the soul of the Tibetan people and culture had been and was still being crushed by the Chinese. His hopes expressed in the book that Tibet could perhaps become like a Bhutan with India, or a Mongolia (as it then was) with the USSR, i.e. under Chinese rule but essentially free to chose their own path, was naive. Communist China would and could never allow that to happen.
As we all know, since this book was written the degradation of Tibetan culture, society and even the country itself has continued. This book is an interesting historical snapshot of a stage in that process. It is not a sequel to Seven Years in Tibet.
