© Columbia University Press
Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule
February, 2008
Cloth, 344 pages, 16 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14286-1
$32.50
/ £19.00
"Demonstrates in full detail the human tragedy of Maoist rule in a land whose tradition
it despised and tried to destroy." — Kirkus
Reviews
"A welcome and informative
addition on this little-understood and highly polemicized subject." — George
Fitzherbert, Times Literary Supplement
"This book provides an important piece of the puzzle for those
seeking to understand the experience of ordinary Tibetans since 1959." — Rick
Carew, Far Eastern Economic Review
"A tremendously moving and important document. Tubten Khétsun
modestly claims that his is not a tale of greatness, heroism, nor historical significance but the
story of an ordinary Tibetan who lived a life of 'animal servitude' under Communist Chinese rule.
Yet the straightforward, rancor-free recounting of the banal details of 'normal' life in occupied
Tibet gives this work the kind of compelling verisimilitude of Solzhynitsyn's
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." —
Jamyang Norbu, author of Warriors of Tibet: The Story of Aten and the Khampas'
Fight for the Freedom of Their Country
provides the most detailed account to date of life in Tibet during the period between 1959 and
1979. Devastating in both his detachment and in his detail, 'class enemy' Tubten Khétsun
chronicles the quotidian horrors suffered by the citizens of Lhasa during two of the darkest
decades in Tibet's long history." — Donald S. Lopez, Arthur E. Link Distinguished
University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, University of Michigan
"This is the first unmediated, single-authored autobiography to
appear in English by a Tibetan who lived through Lhasa's gulag era of the 1960s and 1970s. Tubten
Khétsun, an officer in the former Tibetan government, is an assiduous and unflinching chronicler
of events and their details. He has produced a book that has little trace of the rhetoric or
emotion of nationalist loss. Instead, he offers a painstaking, unvarnished account of the
everyday mechanics of socialist transformation as he experienced it in Tibet. The result, in this
meticulous translation, is a new and important source for understanding modern Tibeto-Chinese
history as seen by inhabitants of the Tibetan capital." — Robert Barnett, director,
Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Columbia University