Overview

In December 2010 residents of Kalimpong, a town on the Indian border with Tibet, turned out en masse to welcome the Dalai Lama. It was only then they realized for the first time that the neighbor they knew as the noodle maker of Kalimpong was also the Dalai Lama's older brother. The Tibetan spiritual leader had come to visit the Gaden Tharpa Choling monastery and join his brother for lunch in the family compound.Gyalo Thondup has long lived out of the spotlight and hidden from view, but his whole life has been dedicated to the cause of his younger brother and Tibet. He served for decades as the Dalai Lama's special envoy, the trusted interlocutor between Tibet and foreign leaders from Chiang Kai-shek to Jawaharlal Nehru, Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping. Traveling the globe and meeting behind closed doors, Thondup has been an important witness to some of the epochal events of the twentieth century. No one has a better grasp of the ongoing great game as the divergent interests of China, India, Russia, and the United States continue to play themselves out over the Tibetan plateau. Only the Dalai Lama himself has played a more important role in the political history of modern, tragedy-ridden Tibet. Indeed, the Dalai Lama's dramatic escape from Lhasa to exile in India would not have been possible without his brother's behind-the-scenes help. Now, together with Anne F. Thurston, who cowrote the international bestseller The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Gyalo Thondup is finally telling his story.The settings are exotic--the Tibetan province of Amdo where the two brothers spent their early childhood; Tibet's legendary capital of Lhasa; Nanjing, where Thondup received a Chinese education; Taiwan, where he fled when he could not return to Tibet; Calcutta, Delhi, and the Himalayan hill towns of India, where he finally made his home; Hong Kong, which served as his listening post for China, and the American Rockies, where he sent young Tibetan resistance fighters to be trained clandestinely by the CIA. But Thondup's story does not reiterate the otherworldly, Shangri-La vision of the Land of Snows so often portrayed in the West. Instead, it is an intimate, personal look at the Dalai Lama and his immediate family and an inside view of vicious and sometimes deadly power struggles within the Potala Palace--that immensely imposing architectural wonder that looms over Lhasa and is home to both the spiritual and secular seats of Tibetan power.

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9781483027364

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Gyalo Thondup is the older brother of Lhamo Thondup, the Dalai Lama. Now retired, Gyalo lives in a cottage in Kalimpong, near Darjeeling in West Bengal, India, on an estate that also houses a noodle factory that he set up with his wife, Di Kyi. Anne F. Thurston is a longtime China specialist and senior research professor at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She has written widely about China and has spent some ten years there since her first visit in 1978. Since 2003 she has been working in Tibetan areas of China and currently directs a cooperative program with Tibetan NGOs in Qinghai, the home province of Gyalo Thondup and the Dalai Lama. She served as the ghostwriter for the worldwide bestselling 1994 book The Private Life of Chairman Mao, the story by Mao's personal physician, Li Zhisui, of life inside the communist party chairman's imperial court. Her other books include Enemies of the People, based on interviews with people who were victims of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and A Chinese Odyssey, about a Chinese dissident in the late 1970s. An article she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly about orphanages in China has contributed to far-reaching changes in China's treatment of abandoned children. Bernadette Dunne is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway. She lives in Brooklyn.

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