Journey to the End of the Empire

On foot, by rattling truck and local bus, by jeep and motorcycle, American poet and musician Scott Ezell explores the Tibetan borderlands in the twenty-first-century Chinese empire. The journey starts in Dali, in the foothills of the Himalaya in southwestern China, and extends north a thousand miles through towns and villages along the edge of Tibet, finally arriving at Kekexili, the highest plateau in the world, and crossing the Kunlun Mountains. Ezell takes us through landscapes of blond and gold barley fields, alpine meadows ablaze with wildflowers, silver-blue rivers beneath “clouds like burning aluminium,” and snow peaks “cracking and shattering into jagged resplendence against the sky.”