The Last Barbarians

the long version

In 1994, seizing the rarest of opportunities to journey deep into occupied Tibet, Michel Peissel accomplished what scores of Western explorers had tried and failed to do for more than a hundred years: He found the source of the Mekong River in the ice-strewn fields on the "roof of the world.". This immensely readable account tells how a small group of modern adventurers made history not once, but twice, in the course of a single year: by accurately charting the origins of one of Asia's most majestic and storied waterways and by finding a living fossil, the Riwoche horse, a species unknown to contemporary zoology that may prove to be a missing link in equine evolution. The book's stage is forbidden Tibet - with its tragic politics, its natural wonder, and its fiercely independent nomadic tribes, who are known to the Chinese as "the last barbarians."