Sky Burial

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. She knew nothing about the Tibetan custom of 'Sky Burial' - indeed few Chinese at the time knew or understood such rituals. But thirty years later, Xinran met a Chinese woman who could tell her the astonishing story that lay behind the legend. Her name was Shu Wen and she had spent most of her adult life lost on the Tibetan plateau.
In 1958, Wen 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, Wen 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 Wen'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... When finally Wen returned to China, she found a country transformed beyond recognition by the Cultural Revolution and the Deng Xiaoping. But she, too, was transformed: in China she had always striven towards a material goal; in Tibet she had learned new spirituality.
In this book, Xinran recreates Shu Wen's journey in a story of love, loss, loyalty and survival.

Xinran is the author of The Good Women of China, a seminal work about the lives of Chinese women. She was born in Beijing in 1958, and by the late 1980s had become one of China's most successful journalists. In 1997 she moved to London, where she currently writes a regular column in the Guardian.