The Story of Tibet
By Thomas Laird. Grove Press, 391 pp, $31.50, hardcover.

Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier
By Hsiao-ting Lin. UBC Press, 285 pp, $29.95, softcover

Like many other great religious leaders, the 14th Dalai Lama has become a global brand. His line of products aimed at western believers and sympathizers includes a long list of books, many of them transcribed conversations with various interviewers. Most are self-help works in the tradition he shares with, say, Dr. Phil. But the new one, The Story of Tibet: Conversations With the Dalai Lama by Thomas Laird, is a work of real value. Over a period of years, Laird, an American who has lived in Nepal for decades, got the Dalai Lama to talk about the history of Tibet going back to the earliest times, with special reference to Tibet’s relations with China and the West. He has checked and double-checked the material and woven it into a narrative that is readable, instructive, and at times touching.

For example, the present Dalai Lama tells how, as a boy, he wandered the storage areas of the thousand-room Potala Palace in Lhasa, going through the strange western possessions accumulated by his immediate predecessor, including western-style shoes that he tried to walk in by stuffing paper in the toes so they wouldn’t flop about on his tiny feet.

The 13th Dalai Lama had fled into exile following the British invasion of Tibet in 1904, which was followed by the Qing Dynasty’s invasion in 1910 and ultimately by the invasion from the brand-new People’s Republic of China in 1950, an event that is the source of ever-growing controversy today. Especially revealing is the 14th’s emotional account of how, in 1954 when he was 19, he was summoned to Beijing by Mao Zedong.

He says: “I had no choice.…I had to deal with the invaders…Mao spoke very slowly and each word carried weight…Also he was not overtly polite.” Five years later, when the Dalai Lama had begun his own exile, fellow Tibetan exiles told him of being “tortured or having their children killed”. He adds: “Often tears would come. Nowadays again, there are too many stories so now my mind is hardened a bit.”

Early in the book, Laird expresses puzzlement about such distancing. The Dalai Lama explains that for individuals who have “trained their mind, the Potala is still just a building. Meditation is not a philosophy; it is a technique to develop that type of attitude, detachment.”

Hsiao-ting Lin’s scholarly Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics 1928–49 is an interesting gloss on this, because it examines how Chiang Kai-shek’s policies toward Tibet changed through the warlord period of the 1920s, the Japanese invasion of the ’30s and ’40s, and the struggles against the Communists post 1950. His conclusion: life in Tibet would likely not be any better had Chiang defeated Mao.

This is another excellent work for students of Tibet. A note: although the author is not easy on Chiang or his brand of fascism, publication of the book was subsidized by the “Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation”. Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor, was Taiwan’s last dictator. To be fair, though, he did not suppress the slow fade to democracy that had already begun at the time of his death in 1988.