Alexandra David-Néel

Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) was a Belgian-French explorer, writer and scholar of Esoteric Buddhism, and the first Western woman to enter Tibet's forbidden capital Lhasa. Her books, including My Journey to Lhasa (1927) and the collection High Altitude Heroines, remain classics of exploration and of Tibetan studies.

Born to a free-spirited lineage, David-Néel spent years studying in India, China and finally Tibet, often disguised and always unbowed. An opera singer in her youth and an anarchist in her politics, she lived to be over one hundred, leaving behind fifty works that opened the Himalayas and its spiritual traditions to the West.