“His manner of life was ascetic and lonely, and there were many days in which he fasted and kept silence,” Harrer wrote.Īlmost forty years later on April 17, 1991, Harrer and his wife Carina would warmly greet the Dalai Lama backstage in Washington D.C.’s Lisner Auditorium. His portrait of the Dalai Lama presented an unspoiled, modest boy untroubled by the wealth and power at his disposal. Harrer’s book virtually introduced the Dalai Lama to Westerners and, in a tale stranger than fiction, revealed the culture and people of the remote kingdom. Since its publication in 1953, Harrer’s story has unwittingly contributed to the myth of Tibet as an exotic and inaccessible Shangri-la. There he becomes friend and teacher to the young Dalai Lama.

In his native Alps, the renowned mountaineer completed his dramatic story: trapped by the outbreak of war while mountaineering in India, Harrer escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp, and survives a two-year flight through the Himalayas to Lhasa. A newly independent India, fearing the Red Army now at its border, soon ordered Harrer home to Austria and a war-devastated Europe. Signed by Author(s).In the summer of 1951, Heinrich Harrer began writing his classic Seven Years in Tibet in a hotel room in Kalimpong, India, only months after fleeing the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

As the publisher, we unconditionally guarantee that all books are authentic and the condition is As New (NOS). The top board is incised with a Tibetan good-luck charm cut by monks of the Tibetan Refugee Center in Darjeeling, India. Protecting the cover is a cotton sleeve, known as a pi-chu, which is encased front and back by a pair of magnolia wood boards, or lepshing. The cover is pure Bure silk, imported from India. We have bound our books in many extraordinary styles, but none so authentically exotic as Seven Years in Tibet. Six gravure plates made from photographs by the author. Seven Years in Tibet offers rare insights into Tibet's mysticism and beauty which Harrer's photogravures, produced from the original negatives, further illuminate.

He and the Dalai Lama remained lifelong friends. Harrer became the unofficial secular tutor to the Dalai Lama when His Holiness was fourteen years old. After his escape from a British prisoner-of-war camp in India, Heinrich Harrer spent seven years among the Tibetan People and recounted his experiences in this memoir called by the Indian novelist and travel writer Santa Rama Rau one of the grandest and most incredible adventure stories I have ever read.

Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer