Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Alexandra David-Néel – Belgian-French explorer, the first European woman to enter Lhasa in disguise

She wore a yak-wool robe streaked with soot. Her face, darkened with ash and dirt, looked indistinguishable from the pilgrims swaying across the Tibetan plateau. Her boots were in tatters. Her companion, a teenage lama she’d adopted like a stray thought she couldn’t shake, muttered mantras against frostbite and capture. They were both starving. They were both pretending not to be European. Only one of them was. And she was already fifty-five.

This was Alexandra David-Néel’s greatest performance — crawling into Lhasa, the forbidden city, under the nose of an empire, disguised as a beggar and Buddhist monk, determined to see what she was told she could not. The year was 1924. The world, still hungover from its last war and not yet drunk on the next, had little idea what to make of her.

But then, the world never knew what to make of Alexandra.

Alexandra was born in 1868 in Saint-Mandé, a quiet suburb of Paris where nothing thrilling ever happened — except perhaps her. From the start, she ran counter to gravity. She read Sanskrit in her teens. Joined anarchist circles before she could legally vote. Practiced Buddhist meditation in a corset. By twenty, she’d traveled alone to India. A Belgian-French bourgeois girl wandering through colonial Asia with a notebook and a nerve problem — the makings of either a cautionary tale or a legend.

She wanted both transcendence and train tickets.

Back in Paris, she sang opera. She also published philosophy. She became Madame David-Néel by marrying a French engineer, Louis Néel — then promptly left him for most of the marriage. Not in cruelty, but in necessity. Some people are built for domesticity. Alexandra was built for altitude.

What haunted her wasn’t a place but a texture — the chill of Himalayan wind, the hush of chanting from a cave, the radiant terror of disappearing into something vast and unmapped. Tibet became her obsession long before it became her address.

She studied Tibetan rituals. Memorized mantras. Corresponded with the Dalai Lama. Not the kind of woman you’d expect to elbow her way into Tibetan Buddhism, let alone become a lama herself. But Alexandra was fluent in the art of misfit transcendence. “Theoretically, I’m a monk,” she once told a friend, “but I still curse when I stub my toe.”

Before Eat Pray Love there was My Journey to Lhasa. Before Elizabeth Gilbert flirted with enlightenment over gelato, Alexandra was hauling herself through 2,000 miles of snow, bandits, and bureaucrats, dodging British spies and the Tibetan government, praying by day and sleeping in yak-dung huts by night.

Her pilgrimage wasn’t sponsored by Instagram. It was paid for in frostbite.

The irony is that she wasn’t trying to become famous. She just couldn’t stand the idea of limits — geographic, political, gendered, spiritual. She wanted to know what lay on the other side of “No.”

And so, like any great mystic-explorer with a penchant for drama, she built herself a myth. Not by lying, but by living in a way so strange and improbable it bordered on fiction. She smuggled sacred texts out of monasteries. Debated reincarnation with lamas in smoky caverns. Lived for years in a cave in Sikkim, meditating twelve hours a day, claiming she’d mastered tumo, the Tibetan art of raising one’s body temperature through concentration alone. Which, if true, explains how she survived in those altitudes. If not, it’s still a better party trick than bending spoons.

Alexandra didn’t just write about Tibetan Buddhism — she embodied it, adorned it, scandalized it. When European scholars were still dissecting it like an artifact, she was living it in skin and muscle.

What made her such a lightning bolt wasn’t just her intellect, though it was formidable. Nor her writing, which was lush, erudite, and deeply felt. It was her friction — between worlds, between roles, between selves. She was an explorer, yes, but also a performer, a philosopher, a provocateur. A spiritual seeker who smoked cigars and bit back at colonial smugness with teeth.

In the photos, you see it — that look of serene insubordination. She’s often seated cross-legged, in monk’s robes, looking as if she’s about to start levitating or start an argument. Her eyes say: “I’ve seen things you’ll never believe. And I wrote it all down.”

She was, in many ways, the first European woman to not just enter Tibet but to understand it — not through a missionary lens, but a mystic one. At a time when most Westerners viewed Eastern spirituality like a curiosity cabinet, Alexandra took it seriously enough to let it rearrange her entire soul.

And for that, she was both celebrated and ignored.

When she returned to France, it was with seventy pounds of manuscripts, dozens of notebooks, and her adopted son — Yongden, the lama who'd accompanied her through the mountains. She continued writing, lecturing, pushing back against Western arrogance. Her travel memoirs became bestsellers. Magic and Mystery in Tibet sent chills down the spines of armchair adventurers and spiritual seekers alike.

But the world shifted. The old empires cracked. Lhasa became a political flashpoint. Adventure turned to diplomacy, then to surveillance. By the time of her death in 1969 — at the unflinching age of 100 — Alexandra had already become a kind of mythic footnote: too spiritual for academia, too rebellious for religion, too unladylike for the literary salons.

And yet, she endures.

She endures because her story reads like a novel you want to believe is true. Because she refused the categories handed to her. Because she walked straight into the Himalayas — not just the mountain range, but the metaphor. She went where women weren’t allowed. Where Europeans were feared. Where belief was more than performance, and maps ended in blankness.

Today, when we talk about spiritual travel, about Buddhist practice, about women in exploration, Alexandra David-Néel is often name-checked — usually with an asterisk, a hesitation, a sense of disbelief. Surely no woman from Belle Époque Paris meditated in caves and slipped past the gates of a city closed to foreigners for centuries?

She did.

She did it in boots that didn’t fit, in a language few Europeans bothered to learn, with a spine made of metaphysical steel.

She did it because she needed to see for herself.

And isn’t that the most dangerous, beautiful reason of all?