So it's been a long time since I've watched the movie or read the book, so correct me if I'm wrong (I'll have to go over both of them in the near future, I'm sure) but there were a couple inaccuracies I noticed that are worth mentioning.

First, it probably goes without saying that the film is a dramatization of one (or more) man's memoir. They had to condense (obviously) seven plus years of a man's life into less than two hours of film. And since this is Hollywood, they cast Tyler Durden Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer. While I think Brad Pitt is a fine actor, it's always a bit weird to me when they cast really famous actors to play historical people. A bit like the film sort of overshadows the events. Compared to Professor Lupin whoever plays Peter Aufschneiter who has a recognizable face, but I can't for the life of me remember the actor's name.

Anyway, the changes made were rather obviously for dramatic effect, which IMO have the perspective of shifting (ever so slightly) the perspective that Tibet was far more underdeveloped and backwards than it was.

The first thing I noticed was that Heinrich Harrer's SS membership was downplayed if not mentioned at all. Harrer has readily admitted that he was a member of the SS, but points out that his political activities were few and far between and was always making more time for his true passion of mountain climbing. Harrer refers back to this time as "youthful folly" and points out how he was absent from any fighting or wartime activities for the duration of the conflict. He was captured and put in a prison camp in India in 1939 and escaped to Tibet in 1944. He remained there for, well, seven years. His and Aufschnaiter's original intention was to make it to the Japanese lines and hopefully find passage back to Austria. (IMO, this plan seems incredibly short sighted, but was probably reflective of a pattern of youthful bull-headedness: "Oh, we'll just cross dangerous mountain passes, pass unseen through a forbidden country, avoid dangerous locals, cross through literal enemy territory, and pass through a warzone and we'll be home in no time!")

When Harrer and Aufschnaiter escaped the British prison camp in India, they did so with the help of an Italian military officer who was also captured. According to Harrer's memoir, he and Aufschnaiter were there in India to do some Himalayan trekking. (This has been the subject of some dispute, mostly due to Harrer's membership in the SS, but AFAIK based on little else.) According to Harrer, he was still of the belief that a second world war was impossible at the time and so there should be no danger in crossing into British territory.

The prison camp depicted in the movie seemed a lot more intense than Harrer described. Though I remember that there were some food shortages, I don't recall Harrer mentioning any of the violence that the movie seems to depict. I took it as shorthand for, "We need an obvious cinematic reason for why Harrer and Aufschnaiter would want to escape." I think in the memoir, the idea of being mountain climbers being locked in a cage, however nice, for years on end seems to come across as more than enough.

The movie leaves out a lot of the adventures that Harrer and Aufschnaiter go on on their way eastward through Tibet. They cross into a village called Kyirong ("The Village of Happiness") where they stay for some time. The Kyirongpa are rather kind and hospitable, but at some point, Harrer and Aufschnaiter are ratted out by the Tibetan authorities and are in the process of being deported. So he and Aufschnaiter leave, upset and rather angry that the Kyirongpa would do such a thing after seeming so nice.

As they cross the valleys in the direction of Lhasa, Harrer and Aufschnaiter end up with a tribe of Khampa heading in the same direction. The Khampa (a rather large ethno-linguistic division of Tibetans from the eastern side of the Plateau) are well known for their settled Kingdoms independent from (or at least vassal to) Lhasa, their famous Lamas, or more importantly to Harrer and Aufschnaiter, their warriors and banditry. Harrer and Aufschnaiter figure out pretty quickly that the women are praying for the sins their husbands are about to commit and the men are getting ready to lead them into a slaughter to kill them and take their stuff. Harrer and Aufschnaiter (luckily) book it the other direction and escape their potential murder.

They make it to Lhasa with beards, another inaccuracy IIRC. At this point they've gone for several months without shaving and are mistaken for Kashmiri traders - a disguise that works pretty well for their purposes. I don't remember anything about showing up in a village and managing to calm down authorities with a photograph of the young Dalai Lama, but I could be wrong. There may have been bits and pieces of that story scattered throughout the book. Overall, it gets the message across: they weren't welcome, had no right to be in the country, but by hook or crook were willing to make it through Tibet to escape British India (well after the war at this point... though obviously their knowledge of outside conditions was severely restricted until they arrived in Lhasa).

Harrer and Aufschnaiter did reintroduce ice-skating to the Tibetans which they still refer to as "walking on knives." I don't recall Harrer and Aufschnaiter ever competing for a woman's affections, or if Aufschnaiter actually married a Tibetan... Aufschnaiter did however, stay in Tibet a year longer than Harrer and wrote a book now titled Eight Years in Tibet (though of course, Harrer's takes the spotlight. It's worth mentioning there's another book in the series written by a Japanese monk called Three Years in Tibet.) Harrer did also become a tutor to the young Dalai Lama, though neither Harrer or HHDL seem to recall as much about it as the movie makes of it. HHDL was (is) very mechanically minded and liked to take apart and reassemble his predecessor's machinery - which included mechanical watches, including one sent to him by President Frankling Roosevelt, a collection of automobiles in the Norbulingka, and a movie projector. He asked Harrer to teach him more about these machines and to teach him English and geography. If I remember correctly, Aufschnaiter spent a lot of time working on hydroelectric power in Tibet when the Chinese arrived.

Here is where the movie departs from emphasis for dramatic effect (one reviewer refers to it as a "pack of lies and untruths" which IMO is a bit harsh) to making stuff up which I think is harmful to the truth. The Battle of Chamdo is depicted in a rather overwhelming modern Chinese army versus a Tibetan gang with bows and arrows. This is beyond ridiculous, equivalent to the propaganda images of Polish hussars charging Panzer tanks with lances. The Tibetan army tried to fight off the British Younghusband invasion with flintlock rifles in their main force and archers and swordsman in their auxiliary. And that was in 1904. Five decades before the events of Harrer's expedition take place, the Tibetan army was already generations ahead of the film's depiction of the Tibetan army. Since Tibet became independent in the Lhasa Revolution of 1912, the 13th Dalai Lama went on a campaign of modernization, which focused heavily on the modernization and development of the military. The Tibetan army, under the direction and efforts led by the 13th Dalai Lama even went on to see some success against the Chinese Republican army in the mountains of Amdo in the 1920s (modern Qinghai Province). In Three Years in Tibet it's noted that the rifles supplied to the Tibetan army were labelled "Made in the United States" though the Dalai Lama himself in Freedom in Exile theorizes that whomever was supplying Tibet with weaponry (whether it was the British, the Russians, the Americans, or the Indians) was funneling surplus material purchased from other countries to cover their tracks. Sam Van Schaik's Tibet: A History offers a similar conclusion since there seems to be a lot of confusion as to where exactly Tibet's landlocked military got its weaponry from.

cont.