| Description |
This unique two-volume edition of travel diaries of the first two Czechoslovak visitors to Tibet has been published to mark the birth centenary of the film director Vladimír Sís (1925—2001), who, together with the cinematographer Josef Vaniš (1927—2009), was the first Czechoslovak citizen to reach Lhasa. Both men provided multiple testimonies about their nearly year-long stay in Tibet in 1954—some during the stay itself, but mainly after their return home. These included a book in English and German, two books in Czech, and period reports in newspapers and magazines. However, the key insights into “how things really were” in China and Tibet in the 1950s are found in their private travel diaries. These contain a wealth of unknown and new information about Chinese and Tibetan society at the time, and many previously unpublished photographs. They collaborated with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Film Studio during their stay to shoot a one-hour colour documentary titled The Road Leads to Tibet. The Chinese version, The Happy Road to Lhasa, was discovered in the Military History Institute in Prague in 2023. The two versions differ significantly, as the Czechoslovak and Chinese approaches to filmmaking were so divergent that two separate films had to be produced. The Chinese version remains unknown to the world outside China and, in fact, has not been screened in China since 1959. The travel diaries capture Tibet just a few years after the Chinese occupation, when the country, its people, and its culture still retained many aspects of the former society, then led by the eighteen-year-old Dalai Lama, whom the authors met and filmed. (They met him again thirty-six years later in 1990 during his first visit to Prague.) The publication combines popular-scientific and literary-style diary entries with scholarly texts, extensive annotations, bibliography, filmography, a table of personal names and toponyms, Chinese and Tibetan terms, and a detailed index. It also includes black-and-white photographs that have never been published before. The accompanying study by Kamila Hladíková and Luboš Bělka sheds light on the ideological background of the entire project, which was part of Beijing’s propaganda strategy aimed at legitimizing the Chinese occupation of Tibet and its incorporation into the newly established People’s Republic. The study presents a series of Chinese “documentary” films about the conquest of Tibet, followed by the project documenting the construction of the road to Lhasa. Czechoslovak filmmakers were invited to contribute their artistic and technical expertise to the creation of China’s first colour documentary film. Their journey was made possible by a cultural cooperation agreement signed in the early 1950s between the two newly formed socialist regimes—China and Czechoslovakia. Much of this cooperation occurred between the military cultural ensembles and film studios. As the preserved private diaries show, Vladimír Sís and Josef Vaniš disagreed from the outset with certain practices of the Chinese side, which conflicted with their own vision of how a documentary about Tibet should be done. These disagreements persisted throughout the filming and ultimately led, during post-production in Prague, to the creation of two distinct film versions. The accompanying study compares these two versions and analyses specific scenes around which disputes between the Chinese and Czechoslovak sides revolved, as documented in the diaries.
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