In the Forbidden Land

In 1897 the explorer and painter Arnold Henry Savage Landor set out to cross the sealed borders of Tibet, a land then closed to foreigners. This is his own account of that reckless journey: the brutal passes of the Himalaya, the dwindling loyalty of his porters, and his eventual capture by Tibetan authorities, who imprisoned and brutalised him before he was finally released. Landor writes with the swagger of a Victorian adventurer and a painter’s eye for the high desert country, and his tale of endurance became one of the era’s most talked-about travel books. A few of his claims drew skeptics, but the drama never flags. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.