| The Hotel on the Roof of the World | |
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The Hotel on the Roof of the World, 10th anniversary edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Alec Le Sueur |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Summersdale |
| Publication date | 2001 |
| ISBN | 9781840241990 |
The Hotel on the Roof of the World is a humorous account by Alec Le Sueur of the attempt to manage the infamous Holiday Inn Lhasa in Tibet in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book was first published in the UK in 1998 by Summersdale publishers and has stayed in print every year since.[1]
Contents |
The economic reform brought to China by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, commonly referred to as Deng's 'open door policy', paved the way for tourism to develop in the People's Republic of China.[2] Holiday Inn was quick to see the potential of this huge market and opened the Holiday Inn Lido Beijing, the first international hotel in China, in 1984.[3] This was followed by the Holiday Inn Lhasa in Tibet in 1986. The hotel in Tibet had first opened in 1985 under local management as the newly built 'Lhasa Hotel' and when the management contract with Holiday Inn expired in 1997, the hotel returned to being the 'Lhasa Hotel', again under local management.[4] It had been an ambitious project for Holiday Inn [5] and the book details the trials and tribulations of taking on the management of the hotel against the backdrop of the fragile political situation in Tibet and the policy of the Chinese government tentatively opening Tibet to the outside world in the 1980s. The book does not go into any detail on the political situation, instead it is a first-hand account of life for an expatriate in Lhasa at the time of the opening of Tibet and the often very humorous consequences of attempting to provide a Holiday Inn service in the most extreme circumstances. Reviews have compared the situation to a real life Fawlty Towers.[6]
The first edition was published in 1998 by Summersdale as 'Running a Hotel on the Roof of the World' with the sub-title of 'Five Years in Tibet'. ISBN 1873475934
In 2001 the main title was shortened to 'The Hotel on the Roof of the World' and an extra chapter and epilogue were added. The book has been reprinted several times, with minor alterations to the cover, most recently to include a quote by Michael Palin. The current UK edition, in print, is ISBN 9781840241990
When the book was published in the US in 2003 by RDR Books the main title was kept as 'The Hotel on the Roof of the World' while the sub-title was changed to: 'From Miss Tibet to Shangri-La'. The current US edition, in print, is ISBN 9781571431011
Other language editions include: Czech, Dutch, German, Latvian, Polish, Romanian and Spanish.