The following day, the white-haired Harrer stood erect under the dome of the U.S. Later that evening the voice of His Holiness was broadcast into Tibet for the first time since his 1959 exile on the Voice of America Tibetan Service, launched in March under Congressional mandate. president to meet the exiled Tibetan leader. The day before, George Bush had become the first U.S. The old friends retired to the green room where roars of laughter spilled through the closed door. “His manner of life was ascetic and lonely, and there were many days in which he fasted and kept silence,” Harrer wrote.Īlmost forty years later on April 17, 1991, Harrer and his wife Carina would warmly greet the Dalai Lama backstage in Washington D.C.’s Lisner Auditorium. His portrait of the Dalai Lama presented an unspoiled, modest boy untroubled by the wealth and power at his disposal. Harrer’s book virtually introduced the Dalai Lama to Westerners and, in a tale stranger than fiction, revealed the culture and people of the remote kingdom. Since its publication in 1953, Harrer’s story has unwittingly contributed to the myth of Tibet as an exotic and inaccessible Shangri-la. There he becomes friend and teacher to the young Dalai Lama. In his native Alps, the renowned mountaineer completed his dramatic story: trapped by the outbreak of war while mountaineering in India, Harrer escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp, and survives a two-year flight through the Himalayas to Lhasa.
A newly independent India, fearing the Red Army now at its border, soon ordered Harrer home to Austria and a war-devastated Europe.
In the summer of 1951, Heinrich Harrer began writing his classic Seven Years in Tibet in a hotel room in Kalimpong, India, only months after fleeing the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
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