Over 100,000 copies sold in Taiwan!
Nominated for the 2009 Taipei Book Fair Award
One of Kingstone Bookstore’s Most Influential Books of the Year 2008
Second in Eslite Bookstore’s Chinese Literature of the Year 2008

The first time Hsieh Wang-Ling went travelling was the summer after his third year of university. Having gone through a recent break up, he was in search of a place ‘empty of memories,’ and so started on a journey through China, from Urumqi to Tibet and back down the Yangtze River through Three Gorges. But instead of erasing the memories, he found that travelling was a means to forgetting oneself. This was the beginning of what would become his Kora, the ritual of circling sacred mountains made by Tibetans in order to renounce their desires and sins, a pilgrimage of prayer to others.

Upon graduation, Hsieh saw an announcement for a travel grant set up by writer and internationally renowned choreographer Lin Hwai-Min, founder of Cloud Gate Theater. He made a quick application for money to cycle from Yunnan to Lhasa, never imagining that he would be successful. Now he had only one month to train before he was to set out on a two month journey that would leave his nearest and dearest worried for his safety. In fact, the two-thousand kilometre route was notorious for its difficulties, and every expert he consulted advised him to abandon the plan. Dog attacks, altitude sickness, snow storms, he experienced them all, and even got lost along the way for a while. But with some of the most breathtaking, and challenging, roads anywhere in the world, this is one of the finest coming-of-age stories to have come out of Taiwan in recent years.

Adapted for the big screen in 2011 as One Mile Above by director Du Jiayi, it won Best Artistic Contribution at the Tokyo International Film Festival that year.