Tibet: The question is all too timely: when is liberation invasion? What is the difference between "regime change" and the extermination of "capitalist roaders"? It's in the perspective. In particular, historical perspective.
The Dalai Lama (the 14th) visited Patrick French's Catholic boarding-school in northern England in the early 1980s, and his "style and exoticism" was the catalyst for 20 years of commitment to the cause of Tibet and its people. Two things drew him: the place and the spirit - though he knew next to nothing of either. He was, like many in the West, attracted to "the mind's Tibet, where none has gone before", a land that can mean anything to anyone: "Everyone has a Tibet of the mind, a notion of a pure, distant land, a place of personal escape, the heart of lightness."
He learnt Tibetan, and Chinese, studied Buddhism, and spent a limited time in the Tibetan hinterlands of western China and among the Dalai Lama's exiled government in northern India. And, over the years, "Tibet became for me, at that time, a land of certainties: an independent country had been invaded by Chinese Communists, who destroyed 6,000 monasteries and killed 1.2 million people, an exact figure, one-fifth of the population".
But in 1999, after long years as an activist, during which time the campaign to "free Tibet" moved from the obscure to the mainstream in the West, his certainties became unstable, and he felt the need to return. "I was drawn back by a sense that the practicalities of daily life were being drowned out both by Communist restriction and the white noise of foreign sympathy," he writes.
Tibet, Tibet is French's absorbing account of the months he spent journeying across greater Tibet, the Land of Snows. It is a travelogue, a history, a political essay, a meditation, all presented in elegant prose and laced with a dry humour. It will fascinate those new to the subject and cause much debate among those he refers to as the Tibetophiles. And it would anger the Chinese - if they were the least bit interested in Tibet, which, he came to understand, they're not.
Popular understanding is that China invaded Tibet in 1950, which is true enough. But China also invaded in 1720, and in the eighth century it was the Tibetans who were doing the invading, conquering large tracts of China (and Nepal, and Burma and northern India). The boundaries of Tibet have never been fixed, and its people have spent the last millennium trying to co-exist beside and amid their Chinese neighbours. Though their cultures are distinct, their histories are inextricably intertwined.
In contemporary terms, the crucial events in the destruction of Tibet were not the 1950 invasion and the 1959 uprising, but Mao's catastrophic Great Leap Forward in 1960 and the Cultural Revolution which followed at the end of the decade. The ruination of Tibetan society caused by these upheavals amounts to little more than collateral damage compared to the evils wrought within China. (French includes, among interviews with survivors of these premeditated genocides, an examination of the documented cases of systematic cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution.)
It's not all politics. French spends a romantic time travelling with nomads in the north-east, visits the monasteries perched in the Himalayas, profiles the "untouchables" of Lhasa, details the origins of the concept of Dalai Lama and, finally, meets Tanzin Gyatso, the incumbent. He is followed by the secret police and by Japanese tourists, and explains how to extract a human eye with a yak bone and tether.
But at the end of this journey of discovery he draws his conclusions:
When I got back to Britain, I stepped down as director of the Free Tibet Campaign. After all I had seen and heard in the Tibet Autonomous Region and its borderlands, I could no longer view things with the necessary simplicity to be part of a political campaign. I doubted whether a free Tibet had any meaning without a free China . . . Above all, I wanted to try to communicate something of the complex reality of Tibet's past and present, convinced that the existing approach of the Tibetophile lobby was leading nowhere, and that the Chinese government was simply not amenable to external popular pressure . . . Caught by circumstance and history, the old Tibet had been undone, and would never be recovered.
French's passion for the place and its people gives us a glimpse of what's been lost.
Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
By Patrick French
Harper Collins, 333pp, £20
• Joe Culley is an Irish Times journalist