3 - A Travelogue: From Heaven Lake

Summary

In 1983 Seth published From Heaven Lake, an account of his unorthodox travels in China using unconventional modes of travel. The book offers an intriguing exploration of places and people in China and Tibet. In his brief introduction to the first edition of the book, Seth tells us that the journey was undertaken when he lived in China as a student at Nanjing University from 1980 to 1982. In the summer of 1981 he returned home to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal. The land route, which he followed on his hitchhiking journey in trucks, originated in the oases of northwest China and went on to the Himalayas crossing four Chinese provinces: Xinjiang (Sinkiang) and Gansu in the northwestern desert, the basin and plateau of Qinghai, and finally Tibet. The travelogue, he says, is based on the journal that he kept and the photographs which he took on the journey. The book received high praise when it came out in Britain and it received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, Britain's prestigious award for travel writing, for the year 1983. No American publisher however was willing to take it on, and it was published much later by Random House in the wake of the success of The Golden Gate, in the year 1986.

From Heaven Lake is a leisurely account of Seth's travels and has some truly poetic descriptions of the natural landscapes of China and warm evocations of ordinary Chinese men and women with whom he struck up friendship.