Categories 2014 Issue 1, UpFrontPosted on

YAMASHITA’S LENS ON TIBET

Yaks graze on a hillside above the Yarlong River, veiled in a summer’s snowstorm. It can snow anytime at 12,000 feet, high on the Tibetan Plateau, Kham, Sichuan, China. Photo: Michael Yamashita.
Yaks graze on a hillside above the Yarlong River, veiled in a summer’s snowstorm. It can snow anytime at 12,000 feet, high on the Tibetan Plateau, Kham, Sichuan, China. Photo: Michael Yamashita.

Acclaimed National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita ’71 recently published a new collection of photographs, Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa (White Star Publishers), a rare, intimate look into Tibet’s changing world—both ancient and modern, sacred and commonplace, the rarefied and the gritty—before the legends and mysteries of the Chamagudao (the Tea Horse Road) disappear into the Tibetan mist. Yamashita captures stunning images of this network of roads, trails, and highways, which wind through dizzying mountain passes, across famed rivers like the Mekong and the Yangtze, and past monasteries and meadows in a circuitous route from Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in western China to the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa.