Yet the country's religion was still strong, and there continued both armed resistance to the Chinese and an unquashable national will. In 1982 he was able to revisit Tibet during the ""Chinese-staged thaw,"" and he was by turns heartbroken and inspired by what be observed: Valuable cultural treasures had been destroyed by the invaders, and stories of concentration camps, forced labor, and political murders sent him reeling. He became an important figure in the country-chief engineer, tutor of the Dalai Lama-but left as the Chinese commenced their occupation. There he found what he took to be an idyll: a sublime mix of Tibetan Buddhism, ancient customs, and dust-free air that made landscape colors incandescent. In 1945 the Austrian author escaped from a British prisoner-of-war camp, hoofed it over the Trans-Himalayan range, and eventually arrived in Lhasa, capitol of Tibet. A fusty, indignant report-dated 1983-from Tibet by Hatter (Seven Years in Tibet, not reviewed), the now-celebrated adventurer who briefly returned to his ""second home"" 30 years after fleeing China's invasion.
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