Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy, and Escape from Tibet
Jonathan Green, 2010
Public Affairs
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781586489595
Summary
Murder in the High Himalaya is the incredible true story of two teenage girls, best friends, from rural Tibet who decided to risk everything for a dream they nursed since childhood to meet the Dalai Lama.
To do so they would cross three countries away in a highly perilous journey that would take them over the passes of the mighty and brutal High Himalaya in defiance of the China’s mighty military machine. It’s the story of those who give everything for freedom and those still, who sacrifice everything to tell the truth.
Cho Oyu Mountain lies 19 miles east of Mount Everest on the border between Tibet and Nepal. To the elite mountaineering community, it’s known as the sixth highest mountain in the world. To Tibetans, Cho Oyu represents a gateway to freedom through a secret glacial path: the Nangpa La.
On September 30, 2006, gunfire echoed through the thin air near Advance Base Camp on Cho Oyu and climbers preparing to summit watched in horror as Chinese border guards fired at a group of Tibetans fleeing to India, via Nepal.
Murder in the Himalaya is the unforgettable account of the brutal killing of Kelsang Namtso—a seventeen-year-old Tibetan nun fleeing with the group to Dharamsala to escape religious persecution. Kelsang’s death is a painful example of Tibet’s oppression by China, but this time a human rights atrocity was witnessed and documented by dozens of Western climbers. Their moral dilemma was plain—would they tell the world what they had seen, risking their chance to climb in China again, or would they pass on by?
At the center of the story is a young, Tibetan girl who has sacrificed her right to return to Tibet by bearing witness to the murder of her best friend to the western media. She risked her future to expose the abuses of China in Tibet and paid the price.
For the last three years, award-winning investigative reporter Jonathan Green, funded partially by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Investigative Reporters and Editors, has travelled the remote parts of the Himalaya researching this amazing story. He introduces us to the disparate band of adventurers and survivors who were at the “rooftop of the world” that fateful morning, as he seeks an answer for one woman’s life.
In this probing investigation, an affecting portrait of modern Tibet emerges—one which raises enduring questions about morality, and how far one will go to achieve freedom.
(From the publisher.)