Description:
Born in Paris in 1868, French explorer Alexandra David-Neel was not your average 19th-century woman. Well-versed in Sanskrit and Buddhist philosophy, she eschewed drawing rooms and polite society for the vagabond life of a traveler and explorer. In 1923, at the age of 55, she undertook a daring journey into the heart of the Himalayas and a land at the top of the world: Tibet. Disguised as a pilgrim, she entered the forbidden city of Lhasa--the first European woman to do so--after 13 years spent wandering remote routes through China and Tibet. Though she took many photographs on her journey, David-Neel feared the pictures would fail to convey the wonders she saw. Now, 70 years after that intrepid Frenchwoman made her way to Tibet, Italian photographers Tiziana and Gianni Baldizzone have retraced David-Neel's route and photographed the splendors along the way. Their journey is documented in the lush and spellbinding book Tibet: Journey to the Forbidden City. Interspersed among the brilliant images of present-day Tibet are David-Neel's original black-and-white photos, along with excerpts from her journals and the Baldizzones' explanations of the culture and landscape. Tibet: Journey to the Forbidden City is both a celebration of a remarkable woman and an elegiac portrait of a culture teetering on the brink of extinction.
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