The Woman Who Walked to Lhasa

Alexandra David-Néel was a Buddhist scholar, an ordained lama, and one of the most serious students of Tibetan philosophy the West has ever produced. She spoke multiple Tibetan dialects. She had lived for years in the Himalayas, meditating in caves, studying under masters who rarely accepted foreign students. She wrote over thirty books.

None of this got her into Lhasa.

The Tibetan capital was forbidden to foreigners, and the British colonial authorities in India kept turning her back. So in 1924, at the age of fifty-five, she stopped asking permission. She and her adopted son Yongden set out on foot in the dead of winter, crossing mountain passes above seventeen thousand feet in temperatures far below freezing. To avoid detection, she darkened her face with soot and cocoa powder, wore a wig of yak hair braided with black thread to mimic local women's plaits, and dressed as a beggar pilgrim. She carried a pistol hidden under her rags. The journey took four months.

She walked into Lhasa during the New Year festival and wandered the city for two months before anyone noticed she wasn't Tibetan.

She spent the next several decades writing, traveling, and being generally impossible to contain. At one hundred, she renewed her passport.

She died the following year, at one hundred and one, in a small town in the south of France — about as far from a seventeen-thousand-foot pass as a person can get.