Tibet as I Knew It

Written in the 1990s after retirement from his services as a doctor and discovered by his daughter in the loft of their house in Darjeeling in India in 2017, this memoir of Dr. Tsewang Yishey Pemba provides an intricate portrayal of early twentieth-century Tibet. With his finger on the pulse of the Tibetan ethos, Pemba offers glimpses into the traditional sociology of Tibet and occasionally its snail-paced reforms, as well as the British Raj in India, while recollecting his young days in his native country. Pemba also draws information from prized sources like his father´s diaries and his conversations with Tibetan and British officials as well as people at the grassroots. His own metamorphosis, as he leaves Tibet in 1949 for higher education abroad, foreshadows the metamorphosis of Tibet and its inescapable fate in the decade that followed.

“Although from a household of British-Indian civil servants, Tsewang Yeshe Pemba”

´s Tibet as I Knew It escapes the colonial gaze of Western travelogues, and at the same time, it never succumbs to the romanticising descriptions prevalent in several exiled Tibetan memoirs. Pemba´s personal recollections and entertaining anecdotes bring back before the reader's eyes life in Tibet in the bygone, irretrievable era of the 1930s and 1940s. A priceless treasure trove of historical and factual information for the expert reader, the memoir will benefit general readers interested in Tibet's social life and cultural history before the communist takeover in 1950.

Found by chance after the author's passing, Tibet as I Knew It is an account of "multiple metamorphoses," as Dr. Pemba himself calls them: The changes taking place in Tibet before the mid-twentieth century, the upheavals of the last decade of British presence in India, as well as the personal transformations of a young Tsewang Pemba who when left Tibet to study abroad had no idea he would never get to see again neither Tibet as an independent country nor his parents. Honest, authentic, enthralling, and narrated by one of the early Tibetan immigrants in India in the early twentieth century, Tibet as I Knew It is an indispensable reading for anybody concerned with Tibet.

Tsewang Yishey Pemba was born on June 5, 1932 in Gyantse, Tibet. He is the author of Young Days in Tibet (1957), Idols on the Path (1966), and White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings (2017).

Written in the 1990s after retirement from his services as a doctor and discovered by his daughter in the loft of their house in Darjeeling in India in 2017, this memoir of Dr. Tsewang Yishey Pemba provides an intricate portrayal of early twentieth-century Tibet. With his finger on the pulse of the Tibetan ethos, Pemba offers glimpses into the traditional sociology of Tibet and occasionally its snail-paced reforms, as well as the British Raj in India, while recollecting his young days in his native country. Pemba also draws information from prized sources like his father

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