37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An indispensable guidebook with great scope for improvement, November 24, 1999
This review is from: Footprint Tibet Handbook: The Travel Guide (Paperback)
Tibet Handbook with Bhutan, by Gyurme Dorje (Footprint Handbooks, Bath, England, 2nd edition 1999, 952pp plus maps).
The greatest strength of this book is that it is the only guidebook to give a substantial account of all parts of the Tibetan plateau, both inside and outside the so-called Tibetan Autonomous Region. For that reason it is, despite its conspicuous faults, indispensable for the traveller to Tibet whose itinerary extends beyond the familiar lands of central Tibet. The book is not to be confused with "Tibet Handbook" by Victor Chan.
"Tibet Handbook with Bhutan" is a guide to all Tibetan regions governed by the People's Republic of China, with additional chapters on Bhutan and the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. It would have been useful to include the Tibetan borderlands in Nepal and north-west India Ä although it is no doubt expedient politically to imply that no part of Tibet lies outside the territory China governs.
At 650 grams, the new edition (paperback) is almost twice the weight of the first, hardback, edition - a curious development for a travel guidebook.
The book includes useful background information about Tibetan religion, iconography and history. The bulk of the book deals with the regions of the Tibetan plateau by devoting a section to each one of the 158 counties into which the People's Republic of China divides it. This approach turns out to be surprisingly intelligible.
There is extensive information about religious places, and buildings and their contents. There is much less information about other matters such as topography, agriculture, educational facilities, military establishments, and political structures. It is as though, in a way, those things belong to a different Tibet.
The book enjoys the benefit of the author's experience as a scholar and tour guide. It also suffers the limitations of that experience, and is often short on practical details for the independent traveller. It is written in a concise style that betrays no trace of personality.
The second edition has been expanded considerably, mainly with valuable information about counties where information in the first edition was inadequate. Unfortunately, the author has not taken the opportunity to check the much more extensive material carried over from the first edition. If he would make time to do that, he would find innumerable internal contradictions within the text and between the text and the often wildly inaccurate small county maps. Almost any numeral, particularly distances, should be treated with suspicion. The relationship between the county population figures and those in the 1996 edition show impossible fluctuations; they go unremarked, but indicate that at least one of the sets of figures is worthless, and perhaps both. The inherent confusion in the existence of both Tibetan and Chinese names for the same places demands a consistency of usage in a guidebook which this one does not quite manage to attain.
An indispensable book, with the scope to become much better.
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