“Our passage in Londre was as inconspicuous as we could have wished. Not one of the villagers whom we met appeared to take any particular notice of us.”
This is how Alexandra David-Néel, a French Tibetologist and explorer, described the beginning of her journey in Tibet in the fall of 1923. She recounts how she and her adopted son, a young Tibetan named Yongden, made their way through the village under the cover of night, trying to find the trail toward a mountain pass that would allow them to slip across the border into Tibet and reach the city of Lhasa.
The village at the foot of the Himalayas—on English maps of the time transliterated as “Londre”—is now called Yongzhi, a Tibetan farming community at the northern tip of the Chinese province of Yunnan, part of the Tibetan Kham region. The village lies right outside the border of what is officially designated as the “Tibet Autonomous Region.” It is perched on the slopes of a fertile, green valley rich with pomegranates, walnuts, and grapes, its vineyards laden with fruit waiting to be picked for the fall harvest. Many of the villagers also work on the side as trekking guides and drivers for tourists visiting the region.
Yongzhi lies in the special Shangri-La tourism zone, which in recent years has become a busy travel destination. The village of Yongzhi is just outside the tourist circuit, but the nearby town of Deqen hosts countless Chinese tour groups who like to spend a night in one of its luxury hotels to photograph the sunrise over the Kawa Karpo, a holy Buddhist mountain on an ancient Tibetan pilgrimage route.
It was this route that Alexandra David-Néel used to slip unnoticed into Tibet, dressed as a pilgrim, her hair and face darkened to hide her European complexion. At the time, the Tibetan government did not allow foreigners to enter the country and stationed troops along the border to arrest unauthorized travelers. I visited the village exactly a hundred years later wanting to see the place Alexandra David-Néel describes in the opening of her book My Journey to Lhasa, which inspired my own obsession with Tibet when I first read it as a teenager.
Together with Yongden, Alexandra set out to be the first Western woman to reach Lhasa. She was 55 years old and had been drawn to Tibet and Buddhism since the time she was a teenager, when she encountered Theosophy, a spiritual movement that purported to come from Tibetan sources.
For Alexandra, Buddhism was an alternative to the suffocating restrictions of the 19th-century bourgeois society in which she was raised. Born in 1868 as the only child of wealthy French-Belgian parents, Alexandra had a deep disdain for ordinariness and the submissiveness expected of women. She longed for freedom and adventure. In her 20s and early 30s she associated with anarchists in Paris and studied Eastern philosophy while earning a living as an opera singer. She stubbornly resisted marriage, which at the time spelled the end of a woman’s freedom. But eventually she wedded a lover, Philippe Néel, a well-to-do railroad engineer based in Tunisia with whom she lived on and off for only the first seven years of their almost forty years of marriage. In 1911, at the age of 42, Alexandra set off for Asia to deepen her study of Buddhism. She spent most of the next thirty-five years there, supported by her husband, who, from afar, sent her money orders and letters.
Alexandra must have infected me with her dreams of adventure. I too wanted to become an explorer venturing into the unknown, free from the humdrum of regular life.
After Alexandra and Yongden set out from Yongzhi, they walked for more than three months in the middle of winter across the mountains of eastern Tibet, a journey of over a thousand miles. They reached Lhasa in February 1924.
This was not Alexandra’s first attempt to penetrate the “forbidden” land. Alexandra had already spent more than twelve years in Asia, approaching Tibet from all directions. From 1914 to 1916, she lived in Sikkim, where she studied with a hermit lama in the Himalayan mountains near the Tibetan border. But she was expelled from Sikkim after making an illegal trip into Tibet to meet the Panchen Lama, one of Tibet’s highest-ranking incarnate Lamas, who lived just across the border in the town of Shigatse.
After her expulsion from Sikkim, she eventually moved to China in 1917, where she spent the next six years traveling in Tibetan border regions. For two years, she studied at the famous Kumbum Monastery in the northeastern Tibetan Amdo region. Twice she joined caravans to Lhasa but was turned back at the border. If there was anything that provoked Alexandra’s anarchism, it was to be told something was forbidden. “[A]ny honest traveler has the right to walk as he chooses, all over that globe which is his,” she asserted in the preface to My Journey to Lhasa.
As the first Western woman to reach the capital of Tibet, where she lived incognito for more than two months, Alexandra instantly became a celebrity in Europe and America. She spent a few years publishing and touring before returning to Asia for another decade of travel.
In 1946, at the age of 77, she finally returned permanently to Europe to settle down in southern France, where she continued writing books that explained the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhism. Alexandra was a master at presenting herself as a no-nonsense narrator who had seemingly rational explanations for the most fantastical supernatural phenomena. Her many books on Tibetan Buddhism allowed readers to believe that there is a place in the world where magic exists, where sorcerers can revive dead bodies, and where meditating monks have to weigh themselves down with chains so they won’t float away in levitation. In the 1960s, when Alexandra was in her 90s, she became an idol to hippies who flocked to her house to meet the aged adventurer and Buddhist authority.
That must be how I encountered her, growing up in bohemian Amsterdam in the 1970s. I remember first reading one of Alexandra’s books, left at our house by one of my mother’s friends, when I was 12. Like so many other readers, I was immediately drawn to the descriptions of the wild landscapes of Tibet and the accounts of magical and spiritual attainment. Alexandra must have infected me with her dreams of adventure. I too wanted to become an explorer venturing into the unknown, free from the humdrum of regular life.
The first time I traveled in Tibet I was right out of college. My boyfriend and I had impulsively gotten married in Hong Kong, and for our “honeymoon” we snuck without a travel permit into Tibet, took a bus to Lhasa, and then hitchhiked from Shigatse to Mount Kailash and into Xinjiang. We could have died when, hungry and sick, we got stuck without transportation in the sparsely populated Tibetan highlands. I felt exhilarated nonetheless.
“I have homesickness for a country that isn’t mine,” Alexandra wrote in a letter to her husband. “The steppes, the solitudes, the eternal snows and the big skies up there [in the Himalayas] haunt me.” Like her, once I had experienced the landscape of Tibet, I kept wanting to return.
Shortly after that first trip, I did the math and discovered that I was born a little over nine months after Alexandra died, just before her 101st birthday. I like to muse that the coincidence of my birth gives me some kind of cosmic connection with Alexandra, and that in my life I have been retracing her travels.
I returned several times to Tibet. In the fall and winter of 1999–2000, I lived for five months in Lhasa as an English teacher. I visited Lhasa again in 2019. But after getting to know the city that had been Alexandra’s destination, this time I wanted to see the place from where she had begun her adventure.
When I arrived in Shangri-La, I happened to meet a farmer from Yongzhi who in his spare time freelanced as a guide and driver. He offered to let me stay with his family for a few days. It felt like a magical feat to arrive in the place I had read about so breathlessly as a teenager in Amsterdam. Only, everything was different now.
The village seemed to be doing well. Instead of the dirt roads on which Alexandra traveled, the area is now connected by highways, with tunnels drilled through the mountains. Next to the stupa that adorned the highest ridge above the village stood a large cell tower that provided 5G coverage. My hosts had furnished one of the rooms in their farm with extra beds, hoping to earn some cash by lodging tourists. Although foreign tourism has almost dried up, Tibet is now a popular destination for Chinese urbanites, and the government has invested billions of dollars to promote tourism in this northern tip of Yunnan. To boost exotic appeal, the county was officially renamed Shangri-La, after a fictional Tibetan paradise in the 1933 best-selling novel Lost Horizon by the English writer James Hilton. I could imagine Alexandra’s fury at this turn of events. She resented the success of Lost Horizon, and would have been piqued that this region, which she knew so well, would be named after an invention by an author who had never been to Tibet and who very likely had read her books for inspiration.
For several days, I became part of village life, in one of those houses Alexandra had been so carefully trying to avoid. I sat with the father of my host when he milked the cows, helped shuck corn, practiced English with my host’s son, and hiked in the mountains. On the second day, we visited the village chapel, where a lama from the nearby monastery gave a teaching. The chapel was filled with villagers, all sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor beneath the lama’s throne, like a scene in one of Alexandra’s stories. Except that some of the attendees held smartphones in their lap to record the sermon.
What we think of as our “self” is shaped by our time, our culture, and our circumstances.
I was lucky to have arrived just in time for the annual cham dance at the local monastery where my host’s brother was a monk. Alexandra called this performance of monks dressed up as spirits and deities “the ceremony of the demons.” I may have channeled Alexandra when the crowd parted and ushered me to sit on the temple steps so that I could have a front-row view of the ceremony. This was the kind of treatment Alexandra always seemed to receive. She had supreme self-confidence and considered it normal that everyone would grant her special favors. She never doubted that even the most influential Buddhist masters would regard her with the greatest deference.
When Alexandra met the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in India in 1912, shortly after she had arrived there, she was convinced she impressed him with her superior knowledge of Buddhism. She recounts that the Dalai Lama inquired which Buddhist master had initiated her, assuming she had studied with a Tibetan lama. “It was not easy to convince him that the Tibetan text of one of the most esteemed Buddhist books had been translated into French before I was born,” she writes, and describes how she eventually persuaded the Dalai Lama to personally compose written answers to her questions about Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.
It felt strange to be staying in the village of Yongzhi. Looking out of the window, all dimensions seemed jumbled up, as if I could spy on Alexandra and Yongden across time. I imagined them hiding in the vineyard on the slope below the house. They had arrived in the village pretending to be on a botanical expedition, but at night they changed into their pilgrim disguises and sneaked off into the mountains toward the pilgrim’s path.
In preparation for my trip, I had spent hours reading Alexandra’s account for clues and had zoomed in on Google Earth trying to determine the exact location of that path. I examined every mountain around the village, trying to discern details in the forested slopes, snowy mountain summits and in the shadows of rocky crevices captured in satellite images.
But, of course, a digital map on a computer screen is nothing like actually walking through a landscape. A loudspeaker on the roof of the village’s town hall filled the valley with the sound of prerecorded government announcements that were played several times a day, stones dislodged by my footsteps bounced off the mountainside toward the Mekong River in the valley far below, and I was sweating in my long-sleeved shirt that trapped the October heat.
I had pictured myself hiking up the nearby Dokar Pass, which Alexandra describes in her account. But once we reached the turn to the main trail, high up in the mountains above the village, my host didn’t want to go any farther. “It’s impossible,” he said. The other side of the pass was officially the Tibet Autonomous Region, where the Chinese government restricts foreign travel because of the tensions between Tibetans who resist Beijing’s control and the Chinese military stationed in Tibet to suppress dissent. I would need to arrange for a government-approved tour guide and apply for special travel and hiking permits.
When Alexandra stood at the head of this trail in the fall of 1923, the situation had been reversed: Back then, it was the independent Tibetan government that jealously guarded its borders. At the behest of conservative Buddhist clerics who feared foreign influences, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had banned foreign travelers from entering Tibet.
During my earliest visits to Tibet, it hadn’t been so difficult to sneak in without a permit, but in recent years the surveillance has increased. The last time I was in Lhasa, in 2019, I found police checkpoints throughout the city, monitoring everyone’s comings and goings. New high-rise suburbs had been constructed to entice more Han Chinese to move to the city, and flashy shopping malls heralded wealth and modernity. The old city center around the ancient Jokhang temple still throbbed with activity, but now the Tibetan pilgrims were outnumbered by Chinese tourists posing for photographs.
On the map, the places along Alexandra’s route had looked immutable and permanent: names with set coordinates. But even the names of the villages that she passed through have been lost. The Chinese government has Sinicized all the Tibetan place names, and the 19th-century English transliterations of old Tibetan names that Alexandra used are often no longer traceable. The landscape of a hundred years ago has changed as well: Creeks and rivers have been dammed, temples have been destroyed and rebuilt, forests have been harvested for timber, and new roads and tunnels are reshaping the mountain slopes. Nothing is permanent. Kawa Karpo’s white peak still rises over the landscape, but even the glacier at its bottom is melting due to climate change.
Culture too has changed. When I look back at Alexandra, a revolutionary in her time, she now seems elitist and orientalist. She presumed herself to understand Buddhism better than most Tibetan monks and haughtily educated Tibetan masters about “true” Buddhism while dismissing their traditional customs as “superstitions.”
Of course, what we think of as our “self” is shaped by our time, our culture, and our circumstances. Alexandra David-Néel was a 19th-century upper-class European woman, steeped in European prejudices. Just as I have been shaped by my own background, and by Alexandra’s tales, which have inspired my own romantic vision of Tibet.
Standing there at the head of the pilgrim’s trail, I considered giving my host the slip and just walking into the mountains. But in these few days he had treated me like a family member. He was hosting me without a permit, and I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Besides, there are no longer any anonymous crowds of pilgrims to hide amongst. The cell towers on the mountain ridges would ping my phone and record my location, like everyone else’s, all of us little dots on a digital surveillance map.
In the evening, as we drank homemade wine with our dinner, I told my host and his wife about Alexandra and her connection to their village. It almost felt like a betrayal, as if I were exposing her secret plan. I had discovered that My Journey to Lhasa had just been translated into Chinese, and I had found a Chinese website with a short documentary about Alexandra. My host’s wife pulled up the video on her phone. “That’s here!” she exclaimed when the pilgrimage route around the Kawa Karpo was mentioned. I could see an idea forming in her mind: Each village in the area was looking for ways to cash in on the tourist industry. Perhaps she thought this could be a business opportunity.
A few weeks later, she posted on her social media feed pictures of a group of villagers she had organized to fix a bridge on the old pilgrimage route. They were replacing wooden beams that had rotted away after maybe a hundred years of neglect.
I expect Alexandra would be pleased if the villagers enshrined her name in local lore. In My Journey to Lhasa, she recounts, with her characteristic lack of modesty, the extraordinary impression she must have made on the people she encountered and concludes:
[My acts] will probably live long in the memory of those who witnessed them. Maybe a legend will arise out of it all; and who knows if, in the future, a learned student of folklore will not offer some interesting commentary on the story, being far from suspecting the truth of it.
Alexandra was as imperfect a human being as any of us: She could be arrogant, stubborn, and prejudiced. But she definitely became a legend.
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