Twenty Years in Tibet.: Intimate and Personal Experiences of the Closed Land Among All Classes of Its People from the Highest to the Lowest.

London: Seeley, Service & Co., Ltd,, 1932. Retaining the genuinely scarce dust jacket First edition, first impression, and the publisher's file copy, stamped as such on the fore and bottom edges. This lively memoir by the veteran Tibetologist includes a description of the time in 1910 when he helped protect his friend the 13th Dalai Lama from pursuing Chinese forces. David Macdonald (c.1870-1962) combined his academic research with a long-held appointment as the British trade agent in Tibet. He participated in the 1904 Younghusband expedition to Lhasa, was on intimate terms with many important Tibetan religious leaders, and spoke Tibetan with an impressive fluency. In Kalimpong, he ran the famous Himalayan Hotel, a guesthouse which hosted Alexandra David-Néel, Heinrich Harrer, Sir Charles Bell, and many other great Tibetologists. Octavo. Original yellow sand-grained cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge yellow. With illustrated dust jacket. Half-tone frontispiece after a photograph of the Tashi Lama, 23 plates, folding map of Tibet at rear. Spine tanned, boards bright, internally clean, map vertically creased where sometime carelessly refolded; rare jacket unclipped, several losses, traces of old labels and consequent skinning on spine: a near-fine copy in very good jacket.