In Xining, capital of the Chinese province of Qinghai, Isabel Hilton found herself among a group of Tibetans being herded unceremoniously into a minibus. The conductor, an ethnic Chinese, eventually boarded, only to find all the seats occupied.
"Get up!" he shouted. "Move! Can't you see I can't get in."
The man to whom his request was addressed was a small Tibetan with a nut-brown face which had assumed an expression of rigid blankness. He stared ahead as though deep in meditation and deaf to the increasing volume of abuse that now rained down on him. Finally the conductor lost all restraint, seized the passenger by the coat and bundled him off the bus.
"Why is it always Tibetans who have to get up?" a woman behind me muttered. An old man in rags who had been watching the scene from outside thrust a filthy hand through the window. "I'm hungry," he intoned. "I'm hungry." The bus jerked forward, forcing his arm out again. The conductor occupied the seat he had claimed and gave vent to a long, loud stream of invective.
The incident is a minor one in Hilton's narrative, but it has resonances that arrest the reader. The Qinghai province, known as Amdo to the Tibetans, was traditionally part of Tibet but, like other eastern regions, was forcibly assimilated into the People's Republic of China and subjected to decades of colonial-style settlement. The bus incident tells the rest: the arrogance of imposed officialdom, the passivity of the conquered, the mutterings of impotent dissent and the pathetic hand of poverty.
But China's cynical role in the seized Tibetan territories such as Qinghai was benign by comparison to its brutal repression of Tibet proper, the ancient monastic theocracy perched at the Himalayan roof of the world. The story of that relationship is a catalogue of lies, broken promises and human-rights abuses on the part of the Maoist government of the 1950s and 1960s. There was a brief period of reduced tension after Mao Zedong died, but Chinese attitudes hardened again in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square massacre and more recently during the tug-of-war between Beijing and Dharamsala (home in northern India to the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan "government in exile") over the identification of the successor to the 10th Panchen Lama.
After the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama is the second most revered figure in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy. The 10th Panchen, a man popularly and, it would seem, mistakenly depicted as a pro-China quisling, was often during his lifetime contrasted with the more flamboyant, West-oriented Dalai Lama. In 1989 he died in mysterious circumstances, possibly of a poison-induced heart attack, courtesy of his hosts in Beijing. Before his death he had presented to the Chinese Communist Party a scathing personal report on China's policies in Tibet.
The years that followed his death involved a formal and ritualistic search for the Tibetan boy who would be accepted as the Panchen's (and ultimately the Buddha's) reincarnation. The authentification of all claims would be based on the traditional signs and omens as interpreted by the most revered living lama.
However, Beijing had other ideas and argued in favour of a lottery to determine the succession. Banned from communicating with the Dalai Lama, Tibetan monks risked life and liberty to keep him briefed on the slow progress of the search. Visions were sought, dreams reported and analysed, divinations and interviews carried out - and repeated appeals were made to Beijing to respect the ancient role of the Dalai Lama in making the final choice. But all to no avail: Beijing's own Tibetologists, denouncing the exiled Dalai Lama as an impostor, argued in favour of their own candidates and of the lottery method, an insistence that was to provoke mass rioting and killings in Tibet itself.
In the event, in 1995 two successors emerged, two Panchen Lamas, one revered by the Dalai Lama's supporters in Tibet and throughout the world, the second endorsed by Beijing and heralded by Chinese leaders as their future friend and ally. But among the Dalai Lama's supporters and what remains of the ravaged monastic communities of Tibet, there is only one Panchen, although his whereabouts and that of his family remain, outside of official Beijing Communist Party circles, an unresolved mystery.
It would be hard to imagine a finer and more intriguing introduction to the tragedy of modern Tibet than Isabel Hilton's present volume. Her graphic and often humorous accounts of her travels in Tibet, China and India, her encounters with some of the major players in the Tibetan story and their ornate and sometimes angry responses to her pithy Western interview questions, make for a book that warrants more than one reading - even in a single lifetime.
Declan Burke-Kennedy is a novelist and an Assistant Foreign Desk Editor with The Irish Times