Requiem for Tibet

In this remarkable autobiography George Patterson, confidant of the Dalai Lama, tells of the mission that took him to Tibet and of his part in Tibet's struggle to withstand China. Brought up in a Plymouth Brethren background, Patterson travelled, at the call of God, to Tibet in 1946. Arriving in eastern Tibet he was befriended by the charismatic Khamba chieftain Topgyay and threw himself into the colourful Tibetan life and its precarious politics as the Communists pushed towards Peking. After three years of living among the Tibetans, Patterson was sent as their emissary, through snow blizzards and landslides, over the mighty Himalayas to India to warn the Western governments of the impending Chinese takeover and to be the publicity 'point man' of the Tibetan revolt. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Patterson was threatened with expulsion from India for revealing the atrocities and, after being exonerated, eventually returned to Britain. He visited Tibet again in 1964, to film the Khamba rebels in action against the Chinese, and once more in 1987, when he concluded that the Tibetan nation was doomed. Requiem for Tibet is a vivid account of George Patterson's extraordinary life, and of his faith in divine intervention, but it also tells the story of the plight of Tibet-a condemned nation once the Chinese invasion took its toll.