Palden Gyatso was born in a Tibetan village in 1933 and became an ordained Buddhist monk eighteen years later. Through sheer determination, he won a place as a student at Drepung Monastery, one of Tibet's "Three Greats", where he came to spiritual and intellectual maturity. However, Tibet was enduring political changes that would soon alter his life irrevocably. When Communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, it embarked on a program of land reform and "thought reform" that would eventually affect all of Tibet's citizens and nearly decimate its ancient culture. In 1959, along with thousands of other monks, Palden Gyatso was forced into labor camps and prisons. He would spend the next thirty-three years of his life being tortured, interrogated, and persecuted simply for the strength of his beliefs, for being a monk. In 1992 Palden Gyatso was released from prison and escaped across the Himalayas to India, smuggling with him the instruments of his torture. Since then, he has devoted himself to revealing the extent of Chinese oppression in Tibet and the atrocities he endured. Palden Gyatso's story bears witness to the resilience of the human spirit and to the strength of Tibet's proud civilization, faced with cultural genocide.

Since 1950, Tibet has been sandwiched between the heavyweights of Asian geopolitics: Britain, absolving itself of its colonial dominion; India, finding its legs as a newly independent nation; China, seeking to simultaneously consolidate its new communist regime and engender a "motherland"; and the United States, striving to contain the perceived threat of international communism. Tsering Shakya here gives a balanced, blow-by-blow account of Tibet's desperate attempts to maintain her independence and safeguard her cultural identity.

"The Dragon in the Land of Snows" provides

- the first detailed account of the behind-the-scenes political developments in Tibet and the Tibetan, Chinese, and British personalities involved;

- the first complete account of the CIA's involvement in Tibet and the establishment of a secret military base in the Nepalese Himalayas;

- the first description of Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's involvement following the Chinese invasion, and his failure to recognize the truth of what was happening in Tibet;

- the first account of the power struggles during the Cultural Revolution and of the mass uprising against the Chinese that has remained secret until now;

- the first detailed account of the negotiations between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government during the late 1970s and early 1980s; and

- the first full assessment of the agenda behind the current and future developments in Tibet.

With careful and thorough documentation, the author details the Chinese depredations of Tibet and the many concomitant shifts in policy and political fortune. However, he also reveals the failures of the Tibetan leadership's myopic and divided strategies to engage the Chinese by on the one hand pursuing a policy of coexistence with communist China and on the other trying to preserve her unique identity as a Buddhist state under the leadership of the Dalai Lama.

Charting a clear course through the intricacies of the historical record, Shakya lucidly depicts the tragedy that has befallen Tibet and outlines the conflicting geopolitical forces that continue to shape the aspirations of the Tibetan people to this day.

China's decades-long repression of Tibetan independence continues on as its global economic power continues to grow. In response to the former and despite the latter, the independence movement persists, represented here through the voices of Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya. Born into the repressive one-party regime, both writers now seek for Tibetan cultural and political autonomy, and although each writer theorizes this goal differently, both are in agreement about what must now be done. The result is this milestone exchange. While Wang suggests the complicity of a fear-stricken religion in perpetuating Chinese imperialist rule, Shakya interprets recent Tibetan history as a history of colonialism, against which the independence movement struggles for autonomous rule. These differing and sometimes opposing lines of thought finally climax in the present struggle for independence, ending upon a joint statement regarding Tibet's future: true autonomy is the only way.

This is the story of the Venerable Palden Gyatso who, in 1992, was released after 33 years of incarceration in Chinese prisons in Tibet, and fled to India, bringing with him tales of his torture. The book begins with his early childhood, his ordination as a monk and his studies. In 1959, he was arrested after having taken part in a non-violent demonstration for Tibetan freedom. Interrogated, shackled and beaten, he was formally labelled a reactionary and sentenced to the first of seven years of his long sentence. In the years that followed, he was a witness to the systematic rape of his culture and religion, the burning of the monasteries and all literature. He was starved, subjected to countless "study sessions" during the Cultural Revolution, and repeatedly beaten and tortured with electric shock batons until his release in 1992, on the promise that he would return to a quiet monastic life. Instead, he escaped across the Nepalese border to relate the atrocities he suffered inside the prison, and those suffered by his friends and family on the outside, to the rest of the world. Tsering Shakya is the author of "The Dragon in the Land of the Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947".

Based entirely on unpublished primary sources, Tsering Shakya's groundbreaking history of modern Tibet shatters the popular conception of the country as an isolated Shangri-la unaffected by broader international developments. Shakya gives a balanced, blow-by-blow account of Tibet's ongoing struggle to maintain its independence and safeguard its cultural identity while being sandwiched between the heavyweights of Asian geopolitics: Britain, India, China, and the United States. With thorough documentation, Shakya details the Chinese depredations of Tibet, and reveals the failures of the Tibetan leadership's divided strategies. Rising above the simplistic dualism so often found in accounts of Tibet's contested recent history, The Dragon in the Land of Snows lucidly depicts the tragedy that has befallen Tibet and identifies the conflicting forces that continue to shape the aspirations of the Tibetan people today.