The Fallen Sky: Journey to Tibet's Heavenly Lake

In 2006, weeks after the railway first reached the Tibetan plateau, the author was sent to Lhasa not as a pilgrim but as a consultant, tasked with helping decide how this long-mythologised territory would be presented to the world that had spent a century imagining it. The Fallen Sky follows that journey from the ordinary unease of a life in Beijing, through the temples and markets of Lhasa, and out along the high plateau, where nomads tend their herds, and prayer flags fade in the wind, to Namtso, the sacred lake that legend says fell whole from the sky. Along the way, the ghosts of Heinrich Harrer, Alexandra David-Néel, and Sven Hedin keep pace, and modern history intrudes on a landscape that seems, at every turn, older than time itself. Neither guidebook nor pilgrimage, this is a travel narrative about the gap between the places we imagine and the places that actually exist, and what is lost and found in the space between them.