Tibet

Fülszöveg

TBET
Never before has the ancient, mysterious land of Tibet been so open to the eyes of Westerners as in this magnificent book. All of that infinitely various country is presented in our sometimes bright, sometimes subtle color illustrations—from Tibet's almost impenetrable wildernesses to the heart of its many-centuries-old towns and cities to the solemn halls of its great monasteries packed with matchless, extravagant Buddhist art.
Expressly to take the photographs for this book, eighteen of China's top photographers undertook an epic expedition to all the corners of Tibet. To get our splendid mountain photographs, they climbed icy precipices in the high Himalayas. To reach primitive tribes living in the remotest forest areas, they walked, led by Tibetan guides, for twenty-five days through wild and dangerous terrain. They worked arduously for eight months and came back with some 15,000 photographs from which our 237 full-color plates have been chosen.
A team of Tibetan... Tovább

Fülszöveg

TBET
Never before has the ancient, mysterious land of Tibet been so open to the eyes of Westerners as in this magnificent book. All of that infinitely various country is presented in our sometimes bright, sometimes subtle color illustrations—from Tibet's almost impenetrable wildernesses to the heart of its many-centuries-old towns and cities to the solemn halls of its great monasteries packed with matchless, extravagant Buddhist art.
Expressly to take the photographs for this book, eighteen of China's top photographers undertook an epic expedition to all the corners of Tibet. To get our splendid mountain photographs, they climbed icy precipices in the high Himalayas. To reach primitive tribes living in the remotest forest areas, they walked, led by Tibetan guides, for twenty-five days through wild and dangerous terrain. They worked arduously for eight months and came back with some 15,000 photographs from which our 237 full-color plates have been chosen.
A team of Tibetan authors, scholars, and people of affairs joined in to complete this rich portrait of their homeland with a text that is at once charming and authentic, a telling account that outsiders could never produce. They give the reader stunning insights into the turbulent and exotic history of Tibet; the geography and amazing potential resources of this highest plateau in the world sitting in the shadows of the world's highest mountains; the unique customs and rituals of Tibet's town dwellers, nomads, and remote herdsmen alike; the role of women in a society where until recently polygamy and polyandry were common; the fascinating age-old ways of life of Tibet's ethnic minorities; the land's unique form of Buddhism, called Lamaism; and Tibet's marvelous palaces and monasteries with their frescoes and statues often laden with gold and silver and rich jewels.
Our book is the result of a striking change of policy by the Chinese. After Tibet was annexed by the People's Republic of China in 1951, the few foreigners admitted there at all were at once drastically limited in where they could go and what they would see and photograph. Now, as an important gesture in their new and welcome cultural opening to the West, the Chinese authorities have allowed and even aided the creation of this beautiful book to let us see Tibet and the Tibetans as they are today, thirty years after the land was almost hermetically sealed off.
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Among the reader's rewards in our splendid illustrations are sights of:
* Never-before-photographed wilderness tribes who still live by hunting with bow and arrow.
* Tibet's awe-inspiring secret rite of "celestial burial," in which the human corpse is dissected and fed to vultures to enable the soul to depart from it freely.
* A brilliant photographic record of the precious architecture and art of the great Buddhist centers of Tibet, including the huge golden-roofed Potala Palace, traditional residence of the Dalai Lamas.
* Inside their monasteries, the daily lives as well as the religious practices of Tibetan Buddhist monks.
* All kinds of Tibetans going about the business of life—churning the buttered tea they drink, using their shaggy-haired yaks as beasts of burden, buying and selling in the open-air market places of their ancient towns and cities, cultivating rice in Tibet's surprisingly lush subtropical region.
* Boundless pasture lands where 8 million animals graze.
* Members of ethnic minorities in their villages, wearing the colorful garb and elegant, distinctive ornaments their remote ancestors wore.
* The faces of Tibetans and minority people, proud and sometimes strikingly beautiful, yet gentle a:nd often smiling.
* And much more.
The texts that enrich the experience of our illustrations have been closely examined and approved by Western experts and expanded by them to inform our readers fully and clearly. Our chapter on Tibetan Buddhism is a concise history of this great religious tradition, specially edited to provide a scholarly but readable account of how Buddhism developed in Tibet and its special relationship there to the earlier primitive shamanistic religion known as Bon.
We are confident that no more complete and truthful record of ancient and contemporary Tibet could have been produced in a single volume. Both in the range of its illustrations and the authority of its text, this book provides'the world with a unique and important document of a long-inscrutable civilization that has enduring interest and meaning for people everywhere. Vissza