The Autonomous Region

Poet Kathleen Jamie and photographer Sean Mayne Smith are veteran young travellers who have trekked across some of the most inhospitable parts of Asia. Kathleen Jamie's last collection The Way We Live (Bloodaxe, 1987) included Karakoram Highway, a remarkable set of poems written on the hoof in the wilds of northern Pakistan. Her travel book The Golden Peak (Virago, 1992) is the fruit of several visits to Baltistan. Sean Mayne Smith has climbed with expeditions in India, Nepal and Pakistan, and for several years has led a semi-nomadic life ruled by a seasonal migration to the Himalaya.
In the spring of 1989 they set out for Amdo and Tibet, where they spent several months on the road and in the company of nomads, pilgrims, monks and traders. Their journey was halted in June at the border of the Autonomous Region of Tibet by the events of the time: general strikes, a military clampdown and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Sean Mayne Smith's photographs testify to the dignity of the Tibetan people and their courageous refusal to allow their ways and culture to be destroyed by the Chinese. Kathleen Jamie's poems interweave her own wanderings in today's fraught times with those of two historical characters she "met" on her journey across China: Fa-hsein, a Chinese monk of the fourth century A.D., and Princess Wen Cheng, a sixthcentury Buddhist pioneer and educator immortalised in Amdo's Sun-Moon Mountain.