A Chinese writer travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover to the walls of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama.

Ma Jian has written a new afterword for the book that explains it's title (it is what a doctor says to an ill patient when looking for a diagnosis) how it came to be written and something about the complex relationship between China and Tibet. This is the first publication in English of an important work of Chinese literature that has had a huge influence on other writers.