Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

Barbara Demick

Language: English

Published: Jul 28, 2020

Description:

A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to Envy.

"You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet."—Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition
Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong's Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the...