Literary places in Gyalrong

Red Poppies

Alai

Narrated by the supposedly idiot second son of a Tibetan chieftain, Alai's novel follows the last days of the feudal chieftain system in the Gyalrong borderlands of eastern Tibet in the 1930s and 40s, as opium poppies bring sudden wealth, guns and ruin, and the Chinese armies close in. The world of the book is that frontier: the chieftain's fortress-estate, the poppy fields that transform it, the market and border where Han traders and warlords come, and the mountains beyond which a whole way of life is about to end.

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