A unique portrait of a woman and
a land, swept up by fate

In the early 1960s a rumour circulated through China that one of its soldiers in Tibet had been brutally fed to vultures. Xinran was a little girl: the tale frightened and fascinated her. Thirty years later, she met a Chinese woman who could tell her the astonishing story that lay behind the legend. Her name was Shuwen and she had spent most of her adult life lost on the Tibetan plateau. . .

In 1958, Shuwen was twenty-six. She and her husband Kejun were young medical students, fired with the hope and enthusiasm of the early Communist years. It was this idealism that led Kejun to join the army as a doctor. But only a few months after her marriage, Shuwen heard that her husband had been killed in action in Tibet. Refusing to believe the news, she too joined up as a doctor and set out for Tibet in search of him. She entered a landscape that nothing had prepared her for - the silence, the altitude, the emptiness were terrifying. But Shuwen's determination to find Kejun drove her on. It would drive her when she became separated from her regiment, and when she was lost in the mountains of north Tibet. It would drive her through long years of wandering in an alien and confusing culture. Thirty years later it would lead her to discover the truth about what happened to her husband...