"First edition publishe 2002" stated on copyright page; by Michael McRae; Broadway Books publishers, New York; hardbound; very good condition of book and dust jacket.
 
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The story of the quest for a real-life Shangri-La in the darkest heart of the Himalayas– a century-long obsession to reach the sacred hidden center of one of the world's last uncharted realms.

At the far eastern end of the Himalayas in Tibet lies the Tsangpo River Gorge, known as “the great romance of geography” during the nineteenth century's golden age of exploration. Here the mighty Tsangpo funnels into an impenetrable canyon three miles deep, walled off from the outside world by twenty-five thousand foot peaks. Like the earthly paradise of Shangri-La immortalized in James Hilton's classic 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the Tsangpo River Gorge is a refuge revered for centuries by Tibetan Buddhists–and later in Western imagination–as a sanctuary in times of strife as well as a gateway to nirvana.

The Siege of Shangri-La tells the story of this fabled land's exploration as both a geographical and spiritual destination–and chronicles the discovery at the end of the last millennium of the truth behind the myths and rumors about it.