It is an opportune time to be reading Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. I found a copy in a bookshelf at our friend’s flat in Lausanne and read a few pages while visiting her. She found her copy in the library of a Swiss chalet where she begged the innkeeper to allow her to keep the book in exchange for several detective novels. I enjoyed the first few pages so much that I asked my husband, a trawler of online secondhand bookstores, to get me a copy. Just a few days after we returned from that trip, I found a 1957 edition waiting for me at home.

When I first went to China, my students in Beijing would tell me how backward and medieval Tibet was. That China had liberated Tibet, and without that liberation, the Tibetans would still be living in feudal conditions. On my very first days in Beijing in 1987, I ran into two Englishwomen who had just returned from Tibet. “Brilliant,” said one.

Despite seven years in Beijing, I never did get to the roof of the world. We toyed with the idea of going to Beijing for the summer Olympics this year, but then we decided that would be the worst time to visit China. And it still wouldn’t get me to Tibet.

But now there is a highspeed train that travels from Beijing in 48 hours to Lhasa. For our next trip east.