Unique access to an ancient, endangered people strips away myth in a rare photographic portrait In five years of travel, often incognito, through Chinese-occupied Tibet and its exile communities in Nepal and India, photographer Art Perry found all the mystery, magic, wisdom, and compassion for which this Buddhist culture is fabled. Yet the land enshrined in his moving photographs and evocative, thought-provoking prose is no Shangri la. Behind these faces and landscapes, from scholars and monks to unlettered herdspeople, Tibetans live with the grinding destruction of their culture. In his journeys through this remote region of the world, Perry outwits the Chinese police with a feisty driver; visits a monastery declared off-limits to Westerners; and roves from the electric excitement of Lhasa"s marketplace to the searing light of the high frozen desert. He visits monks who meditate by flickering yak-butter candles; and he captures a young girl"s bright eyes, a boy monk"s curiosity, nomadic yak herders in their tents, tattered prayer flags, and old men and women blinded by the light. The Tibetans offers armchair travelers, photography buffs, Buddhists, and spiritual seekers of all stripes the pictorial opportunity to enter the lives of a people whose most treasured commodity is the human spirit and whose plight is the last terrible tragedy of the twentieth century.