Sky Burial
by Xinran (9780701176228)

Sky Burial (Book)

Xinran
Release Date: 15 Jul 2004
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 9780701176228
ISBN-10: 0701176229

In the early 1960s a rumour circulated through China that one of its soldiers in Tibet had been brutally fed to the vultures. Xinran was a little girl: the tale frightened and fascinated her. She knew nothing about the Tibetan custom of laying out corpses so that sacred vultures could carry their souls to paradise - indeed few Chinese at the time knew or understood such rituals. But thirty years later, Xinran met a Chinese woman who could tell her the astonishing story that lay behind a legend. Her name was Shuwen and she had spent most of her adult life lost on the Tibetan plateau-In 1958, Shuwen was twenty-six. She and her husband Kejun were young medical students, fired with the hope and enthusiasm of the early Communist years. It was this idealism that led Kejun to join the army as a doctor. But, only a few months after her marriage, Shuwen heard that her husband had been killed in action in Tibet. Refusing to believe the news, she too joined up as a doctor and set out for Tibet in search of him. She entered a landscape that nothing had prepared her for - the silence, the altitude, the emptiness were terrifying. But Shuwen's determination to find Kejun drove her on. It would dr

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