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On the evening of March 17, 1959, as the people of Tibet braced for a violent power grab by Chinese occupiersone that would forever wipe out any vestige of national sovereigntythe twenty-four-year-old Dalai Lama, Tibets political and spiritual leader, contemplated the impossible. The task before him was immense: to slip past a cordon of crack Chinese troops ringing his summer palace and, with an escort of 300, journey across the highest terrain in the world and over treacherous Himalayan passes to freedomone step ahead of pursuing Chinese soldiers.
Mao Zedung, Chinas ruthless Communist dictator, had pinned his hopes for total Tibetan submission on controlling the impressionable Dalai Lama. So beloved was the young rulerso identified with his countrys essencethat for him to escape might mean perpetual resistance from a population unwilling to tolerate an increasingly brutal occupation. The Dalai Lamas minders sent word to the Tibetan rebels and CIA-trained guerrillas who waited on the route: His Holiness must escapeat all costs.
In many ways, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was unprepared for the epic journey awaiting him. Twenty-two years earlier, government search parties, guided by prophecies and omens, had arrived at the boys humble peasant home and subjected the two-year-old to a series of tests. After being declared the reincarnation of Tibets previous ruler, the boy was brought to Lhasa to learn the secrets of Buddhism and the ways of ultimate power. Forced in the ensuing two decades to cope with aching loneliness and often stifling ritualand compelled to suppress his mischievous personalityGyatso eventually proved himself a capable leader. But no previous Dalai Lama had ever taken on a million Communist Chinese soldiers bent on stamping out Tibetan freedom.
To keep his countrys dream of independence alive by means of a government in exile, the young ruler would not only have to brave battalions of enemy soldiers and the whiteout conditions waiting on the slopes of the Himalayas highest peaks, hed have to overcome a different type of blindness: the navet intrinsic to his sheltered palace life and his position as leader of a people who considered violence deeply taboo.
His mind made up, the young Dalai Lama set off on his audacious journey to India while behind him a Chinese army rolled over Lhasa, its advance hunter patrols in fierce pursuit of the man they most coveted. The 14ths escape was an act of daring and defiance that represented Tibets last hope, and so the world watched, transfixed, as the gentle monks journey unfolded.
Emotionally powerful and irresistibly page-turning, Escape from the Land of Snows is simultaneously a portrait of the inhabitants of a spiritual nation forced to take up arms in defense of their ideals, and the saga of an initially childlike ruler who at first wore his monks robes uncomfortably but was ultimately transformed by his escape into the towering figure the world knows todaya charismatic champion of free thinking and universal compassion.
