Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China During the Years 1844-5-6. Volume 1

In 1844, two French missionaries set out for Lhasa, a city no European had entered in living memory. Évariste Huc and his companion Joseph Gabet carried little more than faith and determination into the vast, freezing emptiness of the Gobi Desert and beyond, into a Tibet sealed from Western eyes by centuries of religious suspicion and political isolation. What they found reshaped European understanding of Central Asia. This is travel writing at its most daring: a journey through landscapes so harsh they defy imagination, into cities where European faces had never been seen, across a continent where Buddhism's most secret traditions still thrived. Huc records everything with sharp eyes and an anthropologist's curiosity - the customs of Mongol nomads, the rituals of Tibetan lamas, the bureaucratic chaos of Chinese frontier towns. When they were finally expelled from Lhasa, it marked the end of one of the great exploratory journeys of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of a Western obsession with this forbidden land that continues to this day.