My Journey to Lhasa: The Personal Story of the only White Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City

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 s...