Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood

by Orville Schell

What has made remote, mountainous Tibet and its only real celebrity, the Dalai Lama, so abidingly fascinating to the West? In Virtual Tibet , Orville Schell, one of the preeminent experts on modern China and Tibet, undertakes a strange and wondrous odyssey into our Tibetan fantasies. He recounts the spellbinding adventures of the Western explorers and spiritualists who for centuries were bent on reaching forbidden Tibet and the holy city of Lhasa. Simultaneously, Schell embarks on a parallel present-day journey from Beastie Boys' "Free Tibet" concerts to a re-creation of Lhasa in the high Argentine Andes -- the extravagant set of Seven Years in Tibet , starring Brad Pitt.

At once comic and insightful, Virtual Tibet takes us beyond the fantasies to the reality of an isolated country that has repeatedly won the West's adoration, and paid the price for believing that our allegiance is profound.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, China, Buddhism

352 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2000

About the author

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Om money padme hum

The love of the exotic lurks in many hearts and has for centuries. Some people, when told a place is closed, off limits, verboten, must go there at any cost. So it was with Tibet. But not only was Tibet far away, a blank spot on world maps, it had an aura of magic, mysticism, and mystery. Tibet---mysticism---the occult---spiritual life: these connections spread through the West and Russia like measles in a kindergarten. What a challenge, then, for the adventurers of this world. From the 1600s on, a certain kind of Westerners (missionaries, soldiers, explorers, mystics) yearned to reach Lhasa, the ultimate Forbidden City. Their efforts are well recorded by Orville Schell. Most of them failed, but returned with tall tales nonetheless. In 1904, the infamous Younghusband expedition ("Bayonets to Lhasa") battered its way to the Tibetan capital over the bodies of hundreds of Tibetans who had nothing to match machine guns. This was supposedly in aid of keeping the Russians out, but Younghusband was dead keen on getting there long before. Travel to Tibet, well into my own lifetime, was like a pilgrimage to "Otherness". Tibet, a real society, with deep socio-economic problems, a feudal system, was turned into "Virtual Tibet", a figment of Western imagination.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood----the Dalai Lama became a cult figure for many of the figures of Filmistan. The cultural destruction of Tibet under Chinese rule came to the attention of many who previously could not have found Tibet on a map. In the 1990s, not one, but two movies were produced about Tibet----the film version of Heinrich Harrer's "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Kundun", more the story of the Dalai Lama. Since filming on site was out of the question due to politics, the former was filmed in Argentina starring Brad Pitt. Schell weaves an interesting tale, alternating between the story of Tibetan travellers and the production of the film. In the end, it seems that the film and real Tibet merged because the film brought the extinct version of Tibet back to life for Tibetan actors and film audiences everywhere. "...in the popular imagination of the West, the plight of the Tibetans....occupied against their will....has been added to the lure of Tibet as a mystical place of physical beauty and spiritual refinement." But haven't Westerners created "virtual Tibet" in order to improve the quality of our lives, to give hope that somewhere out there Shangri La really exists? Wasn't Heinrich Harrer an unreconstructed Nazi? Do we know much about real Tibet? These are very interesting questions because Tibet is not the only place, nor Tibetans the only people, to suffer "virtualization". I recommend this book if any of this interests you.

[Brian Glenn]

This is an odd book, and I struggle still to understand what to make of it. The author, Orville Schell, was Dean at Berkeley's School of Journalism when he wrote this book, which was published in 2000. The book is about how Hollywood portrays Tibet. Along the way, he addresses the larger historical question of how the West in general has thought about Tibet since the 19th century.

In short, for the West, Tibet offered an alternative way of living: pre-industrial, Buddhist, spiritual, and devoid of all the evils of western life. Because it largely walled itself off from the rest of the world, it remained a mystery, allowing westerns to project their fantasies of a purer community and way of life.

The book does a wonderful job of going through depictions of Tibet, and attempts by westerners to reach it.

But easily half the book is also about Hollywood, and specifically, the filming of Seven Years in Tibet. Schell also interviews many actors famous for their attachment to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, including Steven Seagal.

The book received the 2000 Banff Centre Jon Whyte Award for Mountain Literature. I'm not going to second guess the awards committee, but this is a quite specific book. The reader certainly learns a great deal of history both about Tibet, and how westerners tried to reach it, and it is well-written, but there is a great deal of insider baseball about Hollywood, which might appeal, or might not.

[anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed parts of this book, and appreciated the long range view of western fantasies of Tibet and the kind of case study of "Seven Years in Tibet," but I felt that some things got repetitive. It was hard for me to keep track of all the various European explorers and writers, and I think I would rather have had the discussion of them more focused instead of being more spread out through out. This cold be specific to my interests, however. At times I felt the book was more interesting when Schell offered his personal experiences and feelings, other times his observations somewhat bored me. But overall, I gained a lot of knowledge about Western incursions into and fantasies of Tibet, and at least a tiny bit of knowledge about Tibet's history and current diaspora. All in all, a good read.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not many books tackle the West's fascination with Tibet in such a readable way as Schell does. My only complaint is that the focus on the film, Seven Years in Tibet, dates the book somewhat.

[Marcelo Abritta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read a long time ago. Liked it but not so much.

[Velvetink]

1 of 18 books for $10 today 5.12.2012