Indomitable traveller, opera singer and anchorite, a onetime director of the Tunis Casino and the first Western woman to be granted an audience with the Dalai Lama-few women have shaped more fascinating lives for themselves than Alexandra David-Neel. She was born in Paris in 1868, the only child of an unhappy marriage, and constantly ran away from home. After studying eastern religions in Paris, she went to India and Ceylon, and thereafter toured the Far and Middle East and North Africa as an opera singer. In 1904 she married Philippe Francois Neel in Tunis: they separated almost immediately, but he financed many of her later travels and they wrote regularly to each other till his death in 1941.In 1911, she left Paris for dNorthern India, where she subsequently graduated as a Lama, and spent a winter with her boy companion, Yongden, a Sikkimese lama, in a cave, dressed only in a cotton garment and studying Buddhist teaching. Later she spent three years in a Peking monastery. In 1923, having travelled with Yongden from Calcutta through Burma, Japan, Korea to Peking, covering nearly 5000 miles by mule, yak and horse across China into northeastern Tibet, up into Mongolia and the Gobi, she arrived at the Mekong River. From here they set out, disguised as Tibetan pilgrims, for Lhasa. It is at this point that Alexandra David-Neel, in the liveliest of her many books, takes up her story, written in English and first published in 1927. It is one of the most remarkable of all travellers' tales.In 1925, after fourteen years in Asia she returned to France, a celebrity. She was awarded many honours, including the Grande Médaille (d'Or of La Société de Géographic, In 1936, with Yongden at her side, she went for the last time to Asia, staying eight years. A legend in her own time, she died just before her 101st birthday, in 1969.
