My Journey to Lhasa

This early-twentieth-century adventure travel memoir by a female explorer is “the sort of thriller yarn that keeps you up all night and is too soon over” ( Ms .). In this extraordinary mix of travelogue and autobiography, Madame Alexandra David-Néel details her 1923 expedition to Lhasa as the first Western woman to enter Tibet’s Forbidden City. Recounting how she traveled with her adopted son, posing as a beggar and relying on her fluency in Tibetan dialects and culture, David-Néel relates a sto