Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet

Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet is a 2005 non-fiction book by British-Chinese author and journalist Xue Xinran (who writes under the name “Xinran”). The book presents itself as the memoir of Shu Wen, told to Xinran during the course of a two-day interview. When Shu Wen’s husband is killed fighting for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Tibet, she follows him to discover his fate. She spends thirty years living a nomadic life with a Tibetan family, before she learns that her husband sacrificed himself to bring peace to the region where he was stationed.

The book opens in 1994. Xinran, a journalist, is hosting a call-in radio program about Chinese women and their lives. One day, she receives a call from a listener asking her to meet a woman who has a truly fascinating story. Xinran makes the four-hour trip to meet Shu Wen in the city of Suzhou. Shu Wen is strangely dressed and has just crossed the border from Tibet. Over the course of two days, Xinran learns Shu Wen’s story, and the rest of the book is given over to this narrative.

Shu Wen is a student doctor in Mao’s China. She meets and falls in love with Kejun, a fellow medical student. When they qualify, the young doctors marry. Their happiness does not last long. Only months later, Kejun is called up into the People’s Liberation Army as a doctor, and sent to Tibet, which the Chinese are in the process of annexing in the face of fierce Tibetan resistance. Shu Wen and Kejun have been married for less than 100 days when she gets the terrible news: Kejun has been killed in action. No further information is given.



Tormented by the mystery of Kejun’s death as well as her grief, Shu Wen volunteers as a military doctor, hoping to find out the truth of her husband’s death.

Shu Wen is astonished by the Himalayan landscape, where the soldiers of her unit begin to suffer altitude sickness. The unit finds a woman near death. Shu Wen treats her and protects her from her fellow soldiers. The woman, whose name is Zhuoma, is a Tibetan lady of high rank who dreams of one day living in China with her lover (a servant in her household, whom she calls “Tiananmen” after the Beijing square). Zhuoma speaks Chinese, and she and Shu Wen bond over their shared purpose: Zhuoma is searching for Tiananmen, whom she has lost in the fighting.

Becoming separated from the unit, Shu Wen and Zhuoma wander for days through the beautiful but barren landscape. On the brink of starvation, they are rescued by a desperately poor family of nomads, who take the women in, agreeing to let them join the family on their journey to a remote region, away from the fighting.



Shu Wen lives with the nomads for the next twenty years. She learns their language and customs, coming to admire their way of life, which seems almost diametrically opposed to the China she has left behind. In the tribe she lives with, women take multiple husbands, and it is men who do domestic tasks like sewing. Above all, Shu Wen is enraptured by the religious culture of Tibet: “Increasingly, she was coming to understand that the whole of Tibet was one great monastery. Everyone was infused with the same religious spirit, whether they wore religious robes or not.” Eventually, she comes to feel more Tibetan than Chinese.

During this period, Zhuoma is kidnapped. When the time is right, the nomads set off to find her and to seek news of Shu Wen’s husband. Along the way, Shu Wen meets some Chinese soldiers, who tell her about a Chinese doctor who once received the Tibetan ritual of sky burial. Shu Wen and the nomads find Zhuoma and Tiananmen, and proceed to a gathering of nomads.

At the gathering, Shu Wen learns the story of her husband’s death from an elderly sage. While Kejun’s unit was pacifying the sage’s region, they came across a sky burial: the body of a young Buddhist lama had been left exposed to be eaten by vultures. Not knowing about the practice, Kejun tried to retrieve the body, shooting one of the vultures in the process. This interruption of this sacred rite caused violent friction with the local Tibetans, so in the end, Kejun offered to undergo sky burial himself, in order to restore harmony. The sage tells Shu Wen that he will sing Kejun’s praises for as long as he lives.



The story of Kejun’s death brings Shu Wen peace, and she decides to return to her native city. When she meets Xinran she is still searching for her family. The book closes with an open letter asking Shu Wen to contact the author.

Sky Burial provides a history of the 1956-58 Tibetan resistance movement and an introduction to Tibetan culture. Many reviewers questioned the authenticity of the story, and others suggested that the book’s account of the war in Tibet was excessively pro-Chinese. However, as storytelling, the Sky Burial was well-received: hailed by Kirkus Reviews as a “picaresque fairy tale with elements of National Geographic, but also lovely, spare and mystical.”