It all started with a little book published in 1925 that Irène Frain discovered in a library in Pondicherry, India. It describes a strange event: in eastern Tibet, an explorer is said to have fallen victim to a mysterious, sovereign and cruel queen surrounded by her council of 70 women. The last matriarchal reign.
Her curiosity aroused, Irène Frain begins to investigate, and soon stumbles across an emblematic figure: Joseph Rock. For over a year, from the archives of National Geographic to Vienna and the Association of Peony Lovers, on line and undertaking two long voyages with her husband through the border regions between Tibet and China, she put together the pieces of her character’s puzzle before undertaking the writing of a major saga: In the Kingdom of Women, published by Editions Fayard in January 2007, at the same time as 'The World of Rock', her research notebooks.
A “making-of” à la Borgès, in which readers will let themselves be drawn on to surprising byways through libraries and across the roof of the world and its eternal snows.

Who was Joseph Rock? What secret pushed this extraordinary botanist and linguist to strike out from 1920s Vienna for the perilous paths separating China and Tibet?
François and Irène Frain were fascinated by the enigma of this star reporter for National Geographic and savant-adventurer who launched a mad expedition to conquer the chimerical mountain taller than Everest and the no-less-unlikely “Kingdom of Women”, before retiring to deepest Yunnan, where he saved the immemorial heritage of the Na-khi people from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.
For several months they followed in Rock’s footsteps, from the crowded cities of southern China to isolated lamaseries perched over 10,000 feet above sea level in eastern Tibet, and on to the valleys of the mysterious kingdom where Rock spent so much time pursuing the “Queen of the Goloks”. Above and beyond the discovery of a prodigious man who managed to protect unique plants as well as books, a culture, a language and a hitherto-unknown writing system, Irène Frain’s text and François Frain’s photos express the call that comes sooner or later to inhabit each of us, 'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges – Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!'
The tale of a grand, shared adventure in which, page by page, the reader’s experience is enhanced by the dual approach: the visual and the verbal.