Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud
'Ten Thousand miles without a cloud' is a Buddhist saying. It means the search for a mind clear of doubts: a perfect title for this remarkable book on a journey of discovery and faith.
Sun Shuyun grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. At school, it was more important to learn the right attitudes than study. But she shared a room, a bed, with her grandmother, hearing her forbidden prayers — for her grandmother remained a Buddhist. By the time Sun Shuyun reached university, she saw the bitter disillusionment of her father and his comrades — communism had not delivered their ideals — and wondered where to turn for hers.
Once outside China, Sun Shuyun discovered the fame of a true Chinese hero, Xuanzang, the monk in the famous Chinese novel The Monkey King. So Sun Shuyun retraces Xuanzang's steps from China, on the ancient Silk Road through Central Asia to India and back— the journey he made to find true Buddhism — and in doing so traverses four landscapes — personal, historical, cultural and spiritual. Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud gives us a vivid and fascinating insight into China and its people, past and present.
Moving, brilliantly visual, original, Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud is an extraordinary voyage of the soul.
[Reviews]
Packed with erudition and perception… it is also honest, sensitive, entirely without ego … ultimately a meditation on the human condition. Evening Standard
Her journey through the faith so demonised in her youth is a gently moving one. Both her longing and her scepticism are deeply sympathetic. Sunday Telegraph
In the superb Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud, Sun Shuyun follows Xuanzang's epic route … , all the while attempting to understand the Buddhist faith of her grandmother and align it with her father's hardline Communism. Condé Nast Traveller
Sun's own journey was hardly a cakewalk, but we must be grateful that she persisted and that she completed her pioneering and fascinating book … an exploration of private and collective memory and a journey in search of spirituality. The Guardian
This is at once a deeply personal, spiritual journey and an interesting insight into some of the roads less travelled in China and India. For Sun Shuyun herself it is about finding meaning in the complexities of China's and her own history. While its focus is on the past, it tells us much about the present China and hints at something of the future. The Age
A Year In Tibet
Sun Shuyun spends a year in Gyantse, the third largest town in Tibet, and records what life is really like for ordinary Tibetans.
She explores the intimate details of the lives of a shaman and his family, monks, a village doctor, a Party worker, a hotel manager, a successful builder, and a rickshaw driver. Through them she captures the tensions between Chinese and Tibetans, between an ancient and an alien culture, faith and science, continuity and modernisation.
This is a book with a difference: unusually, a realistic Chinese voice is calling for better understanding of a people who try to carve out the path they desire, often against the odds, often with joy and hope.
Vivid, fascinating and visually brilliant, A Year in Tibet provides a rare insight into a Tibetan community under the pressure of change: from centuries of isolation through a difficult past to an uncertain present.
[Reviews]
"Sun Shuyun's A Year in Tibet is unique. Neither academic nor sentimental, it supplies information and analysis from which even Tibetanists will learn. An important book.” Literary Review
"A revealing personal portrait of a year spent in a Tibetan village." Scotsman
"Throughout A Year in Tibet it is experiences like [the sky burial] that intrigue Shuyun … an enlightening look at one of the least known people on the planet." Observer
"[The sky burial] is just one of the arresting vignettes in a fascinating account of the year that the author and a film crew spent in a village in a remote corner of Tibet. Sun Shuyun uses it to chart a personal and sometimes painful journey. Her book focuses on a less familiar story: despite oppression, ancient ways are surviving and superstition, in a range of deities, persists. All this takes place in a beautiful but implacable environment." Daily Telegraph
"While making it clear that life in modern Tibet is far from idyllic … what does come through is the Tibetan people's remarkable serenity even in the midst of terrible hardships." Daily Mail
The Long March
Every nation has its founding myth, and for modern China it is the Long March. In 1934, the fledgling Communist Party and its 200,000 strong armies were forced out of their bases by Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist troops. Walking more than 10,000 miles over mountains, grassland and swamps, they suffered appalling casualties and ended up in the remote barren North. Just one-fifth survived; they went on to launch the new China in the heat of revolution. A legend was born. Justified by a remarkable feat, the Long March was also a triumph of propaganda, for Mao and for the revolution.
Seventy years later Sun Shuyun set out to retrace the Marchers' steps. The rugged landscape has changed little. Her greatest difficulty was in wrestling with the scenes lodged in her mind since childhood, part of the upbringing of every Chinese. On each stage of her journey, she found hidden stories: the ruthless purges, the terrible toll of hunger and disease, the fate of women on the March, the huge number of desertions, the futile deaths. The real story of the March, the most vivid pictures, come from the veterans whom Sun Shuyun has found. She follows their trail through all those harsh miles, discovers their faith and disillusion, their pain and their hopes, and also recounts how many suffered even after the March's end in 1936.
The Long March was an epic journey of endurance, even more severe than history books say, and courage against impossible odds. It is a brave, exciting and tragic story. Sun Shuyun tells it for the first time, as it really happened.
[Reviews]
Her engrossing book … creates a vivid sense of time and place. Her account is helped by her engaging writing. She writes flawless English, but with a strong Chinese flavour, which gives it authenticity and directness … and it is deeply moving. Toronto Globe and Mail, 2007
Recording the realities beyond the myth - the ruthless purges, hunger, disease, and a huge number of desertions and futile deaths - she reveals the March as it was lived, without the "embroidery of adulation". Yet her compassion for her subjects and the true grit of her own journey paradoxically prove the achievement of the March to be so much greater than the official version. Guardian, 2007
Specialists in this period will now burrow into Sun's sources … from the ocean of lies about the Long March she has salvaged much truth. The Long Marchers, she concludes, 'rose to their challenge with a bravery and self-sacrifice unsurpassed in China's or anyone's history'. Literary Review, 2006
Despite the revelations of horror and hardship, Sun's account is filled with compassion for the marchers. Although hijacked by propaganda, the March was still driven by the courage of ordinary soldiers who believed in the promises of freedom and equality made by the communists. South China Morning Post
Sun's sensibility benefits from her being part Chinese and part British. She is reduced to tears at some survivors' continuing privations, but is still able to praise the Marxists' efforts, especially on behalf of women, citing one informant who remembered memorizing new Chinese characters week by week as she marched. She makes a special effort to understand the fate of the Western Legion, abandoned in the far north-west in 1936-7 and until recently a taboo subject. Times Literary Supplement
Mao's grand strategy loses its magnificence in this account. The author paints arresting portraits of those [veterans] who have led such pitiless lives … The fluent and lively writing gives her account a novel-like allure that will afford the reader much pleasure. A unique and captivating book, not to be missed. Le Monde, 2008
Sun's book sheds light on several dark places in the record hitherto, brings out very clearly the danger and the harshness of life for the rank and file on the March, and again shows that the March was not a victory for Chinese communism but a narrow escape from destruction. China Business Review, 2006
Other historians and scholars have found fault with the Communist Party's account of the Long March, but Sun's research provides a new baseline for all future treatment of that major propaganda event. … Sun's objective reporting of what she learned about the sufferings of the marchers adds up to a more impressive story than the party's propaganda version. Foreign Affairs, 2008