In his latest book Xueyu Yuanwang Shu (Wish Trees in the Snow Area), veteran reporter Li Xiaolin recorded with reverence the present challenges and opportunities facing Tibetan medicine, and introduced in simple language the history of the ancient medicine.

The book is the fruit of Li's 18 trips to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over the past five years to visit dozens of Tibetan hospitals and interview hundreds of Tibetan doctors.

His book introduces the dangers threatening the natural environment of the plateau; the price of Tibetan medical herbs; the fate of Tibetan medicine hospitals; the lives of famous Tibetan doctors; and the achievements of entrepreneur Lei Jufang in developing the medicine.

"The book is itself a meaningful document," wrote Zhu Guobei, president of the Chinese Ethnic Medicine Society in the preface.

In his trips Li went to sacred mountains, picked herbs along mountain paths and slept among the flowers in the grassland. "No matter how I get across the plateau I am always only ever on its edge. It has a great impact on everyone who enters it. It's really a special land," wrote Li.

Born into a Miao family in Jianshi, central China's Hubei Province, Li has been a reporter for the Beijing-based Chinese Ethnic Groups magazine since 1988. He had already published four books on ethnic group communities in China.

Xueyu Yuanwang Shu (Wish Trees in the Snow Area), by Li Xiaolin, 299 pages, 39.8 yuan (US$4.8), published by the China Tibetan Studies Publishing House.

(China Daily August 26, 2003)