The Last Tibetan Kingdom

Having lost the anchor of home it was as though I needed to fix upon some other unchanging and seemingly permanent thing, otherwise I would sink.
When Rose Lane's family home is sold, she loses more than bricks and mortar - she loses her last sense of belonging. Born into a family marked by silence and grief, she has always been an outsider. Now, untethered, she turns her gaze to a distant place she's only read about: the medieval walled city of Lo Manthang, high on the windswept Tibetan plateau in Nepal.
Reaching it means two weeks on horseback at an altitude of over 3,000 metres - a seeminglyimpossible task for someone who tires after a short walk. But with her husband, a local guide, and a sceptical team around her, Rose sets out to prove that she's stronger than she believes.
As she travels through a landscape steeped in history and spiritual mystery, she witnesses a fading world: ancient monasteries crumbling, traditions eroding, climate and politics reshaping lives. Lo Manthang is changing - and so is she.
The Last Tibetan Kingdom is a story of physical and emotional endurance, of confronting loss, and of discovering that home isn't a place you keep - it's something you carry, and sometimes, something you must learn to let go of.

Rose Lane is an Australian writer who is inspired by the untold stories of people and places. Her passion for adventure travel has taken her from Arctic Canada to Everest Base Camp in Tibet, allowing her to experience all the new, unusual and wild things the world has to offer.After completing an Arts degree in English and French at the University of Queensland, Rose trained as a nurse, enabling her to both travel and work. This took her to London for a year and to caring for disabled children in Nepal, where she, her husband and three sons spent a month volunteering and living with a local family.In 2016, Rose completed a Masters in Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology during which time she travelled to Upper Mustang, Nepal. Her account of this journey became the major project for her Masters degree from which The Last Tibetan Kingdom emerged. The manuscript was subsequently selected for the 2017 Hardcopy Manuscript Development Program at the Australian Writers' Centre in Canberra. Rose's work, which ranges from anti-war activism to music and disability awareness, has been published in The Guardian, The Big Issue, New Matilda, Living Now, Link Disability. She contributed a chapter to the anthology Brother and Sisters: Coping with Grief and Loss, worked as a senior content writer for The Australian Farmer and was a regular contributor to her local digital newspaper the Westender until 2024. Rose lives in Brisbane with her husband.