''The Hotel on the Roof of the World'' is a humorous account by Alec Le Sueur of the attempt to manage the Holiday Inn Lhasa in

Tibet Tibet (; ''Böd''; ) is a region in East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are some other ethnic groups such as Monpa, Taman ...

in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book was published in the UK in 1998 by

Summersdale Summersdale Publishers Ltd (often simply Summersdale) is an English independent publishing firm of non-fiction. The company is based in Chichester, West Sussex. Founded in 1990 by Stewart Ferris and Alastair Williams, it has since published ov ...

and has remained in print since then.

Background

The economic reform brought to China by

Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After CCP ...

in 1978, known as Deng's '

open door policy The Open Door Policy () is the United States diplomatic policy established in the late 19th and early 20th century that called for a system of equal trade and investment and to guarantee the territorial integrity of Qing China. The policy wa ...

' allowed tourism to develop in the China.

Holiday Inn Holiday Inn is an American chain of hotels based in Atlanta, Georgia. and a brand of IHG Hotels & Resorts. The chain was founded in 1952 by Kemmons Wilson, who opened the first location in Memphis, Tennessee that year. The chain was a division ...

opened the Holiday Inn Lido Beijing, the first international hotel in China in 1984, followed by the Holiday Inn Lhasa in

in 1986. The latter opened in 1985 under local management as the newly built 'Lhasa Hotel'; when the management contract with Holiday Inn expired in 1997, the hotel returned to local management. It had been an ambitious project for Holiday Inn and the book details the difficulties of managing the hotel and the tentative opening of Tibet to the outside world in the 1980s. The book gives no detail on the political situation, but describes life for an expatriate in Lhasa and the humorous consequences of attempting to provide a Holiday Inn service in those circumstances. Reviews compared the situation to a real life

Fawlty Towers ''Fawlty Towers'' is a British television sitcom written by John Cleese and Connie Booth, broadcast on BBC2 in 1975 and 1979. Two series of six episodes each were made. The show was ranked first on a list of the 100 Greatest British Televisio ...

Editions

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'. In 2001 the 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, lately to include a quote by

Michael Palin Sir Michael Edward Palin (; born 5 May 1943) is an English actor, comedian, writer, television presenter, and public speaker. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. Since 1980, he has made a number of travel documentaries. Palin w ...

. The book was published in the US in 2003 by RDR Books with a new sub-title: 'From Miss Tibet to Shangri-La'. Other language editions include Czech, Dutch, German, Latvian, Polish, Romanian and Spanish.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hotel on the Roof of the World Lhasa British travel books 2001 non-fiction books Holiday Inn Hotels in Tibet Books about Tibet English non-fiction books