For Sun Shuyun, her book A Year in Tibet began as a wish formulated in her university years. 'It had been a dream since I left Oxford,' she says. Sun, who studied international relations for her master's degree in the late 1980s, was taught by Tibet expert Michael Aris, the late husband of Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The topic of her thesis was the role of Britain in Tibet as it withdrew from India in 1947.
Despite the subject's seemingly good academic credentials, the writer-filmmaker, who directed the BBC series of the same name, was initially put off by the idea. 'I hesitated for a long time, even decades,' she says. 'Tibet is a very sensitive place, also very tough. More importantly, I wanted to do it only if I understood the place and the people. I asked myself: 'Am I the right person to do it? Can I really handle it?' These two elements, the [outside] control and the self-consciousness, were really at the back of my mind.'
For many people on the mainland, Tibet is either an exotic, mysterious place or a poor, feudalistic land inhabited by backward people and ruled by superstitious beliefs. In the preface of the book, Sun says she had such a romantic notion of the region she was tempted to work there. Her parents - her father was a party cadre - opposed the idea, believing Tibetans were barbarians.
The project finally rolled after she finished her second book, 2006's The Long March. A friend from her Oxford years, a Tibetan anthropologist, often did fieldwork in Tibet. For several years Sun joined his trips. 'We spent one or two months every year in deep, remote areas,' she says. 'Being an anthropologist, he was interested in seeing how political and material changes affected traditional society.
'After I finished The Long March he told me: 'You always wanted to do something on Tibet and you weren't ready. Tibet is changing so fast and in a few years it might change beyond recognition. I can help you. I can be on the side of Tibetan culture and you as a brilliant filmmaker would do the job.' I thought long and hard and I decided I could do it.'
The book details Sun's encounters with ordinary Tibetans while she and her film crew of Tibetans and Chinese lived for 18 months in Gyantse county to make the BBC documentary. The result in both print and celluloid versions is a vivid and humane impression of an array of people, including a shaman, a builder, a village doctor, a party official, a hotel manager, two monks and a rickshaw driver.
