World-famous explorers of the Tibetan territory

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The location of Tibet, deep in the Himalaya mountains, made travel to Tibet extraordinarily difficult at any time, in addition to the fact that it traditionally was forbidden to all western foreigners.

Additionally, the internal and external politics of Tibet, China, Bhutan, Assam, and the northern Indian kingdoms combined rendered entry into Tibet politically difficult for all explorers.

Theos Casimir Bernard

Theos Casimir Hamati Bernard (1908–1947) was an explorer and author, known for his work on yoga and religious studies, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism. He was the nephew of Pierre Arnold Bernard, “Oom the Omnipotent”, like him becoming a yoga celebrity.

Albert d’Orville

Albert Dorville, was a Belgian Jesuit priest, missionary in China and cartographer.

Joseph Rock

Joseph Francis Charles Rock was an Austrian-American botanist, explorer, geographer, linguist, ethnographer and photographer.

Thomas Manning (sinologist)

Thomas Manning is considered the first lay Chinese studies scholar in Europe and was the first Englishman to enter Lhasa, the holy city of Tibet.

Theodore Illion

Theodore Illion or Theodor Illion, is a writer of travel books who claimed to have visited Tibet in the 1930s and discovered an underground city there. He published his Tibetan adventures under that name but later resorted to the pseudonyms Theodore Burang or Theodor Burang and more rarely Theodor Nolling to write various books and articles on Tibetan medicine.

Tamotsu Nakamura

Tamotsu Nakamura, FRGS, is a Japanese explorer, alpinist, photographer and author. Since 1990, he has explored the mountainous areas between the Himalayas and the Sichuan basin; which he documents in photographs. He is a leading authority on the Alps of Tibet, the south-eastern sector of the Tibetan high plateau.

Sven Hedin

Sven Anders Hedin, KNO1kl RVO, was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, travel writer and illustrator of his own works. During four expeditions to Central Asia, he made the Transhimalaya known in the West and located sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej Rivers. He also mapped lake Lop Nur, and the remains of cities, grave sites and the Great Wall of China in the deserts of the Tarim Basin. In his book Från pol till pol, Hedin describes a journey through Asia and Europe between the late 1880s and the early 1900s. While traveling, Hedin visited Turkey, the Caucasus, Tehran, Iraq, lands of the Kyrgyz people and the Russian Far East, India, China and Japan. The posthumous publication of his Central Asia Atlas marked the conclusion of his life’s work.

Pyotr Kozlov

Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov was a Russian and Soviet traveler and explorer who continued the studies of Nikolai Przhevalsky in Mongolia and Tibet.

Nikolay Przhevalsky

Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky was a Russian Imperial geographer and a renowned explorer of Central and East Asia.

Mikhail Berezovsky

Mikhail Mikhailovich Berezovsky was a Russian ornithologist and ethnologist who explored central Asia and other region as part of Russian expeditions. He made numerous collections of natural history and anthropological interest. A number of species described from his collections have been named after him.

Marco Pallis

Marco Alexander Pallis was a Greek-British author and mountaineer with close affiliations to the Traditionalist School. He wrote works on the religion and culture of Tibet.

John W. Olsen

John W. Olsen, Ph.D., is an American archaeologist and paleoanthropologist specializing in the early Stone Age prehistory and Pleistocene paleoecology of eastern Eurasia. Olsen is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Executive Director of the Je Tsongkhapa Endowment for Central and Inner Asian Archaeology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, USA. He is also a Lead Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Siberian Branch in Novosibirsk and Guest Research Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing where he is also Co-Director of the Zhoukoudian International Paleoanthropological Research Center (周口店国际古人类研究中心联席主任). Olsen has been named a Distinguished Researcher of the Nihewan Research Center in Hebei Province, China (泥河湾研究中心特聘研究员). He is also a Foreign Expert affiliated with The Yak Museum in Lhasa, Tibet (西藏牦牛博物馆国外专家).

Albert Shelton

Albert Leroy Shelton (1875-1922) was an American medical doctor and a Protestant missionary in China, especially in Batang in the Kham region of eastern Tibet, from 1903 until 1922. He authored a popular book about his experiences and collected Tibetan cultural items and sold them to museums. He was shot and killed by brigands in 1922 while traveling by mule near Batang.

Jeff Fuchs

Jeff Fuchs is a Canadian explorer, mountaineer and writer. He gained prominence with his successful bid to become the first westerner to trek the entire Yunnan–Tibet Ancient Tea Horse Road, stretching almost six thousand kilometers through the Himalayas and a dozen cultures, documented in the book The Ancient Tea Horse Road: Travels with the Last of the Himalayan Muleteers (2008). He is also acting Asia-Editor-at-Large for Outpost Magazine.

Jacques Bacot

Jacques Bacot was an explorer and pioneering French Tibetologist. He travelled extensively in India, western China, and the Tibetan border regions. He worked at the École pratique des hautes études. Bacot was the first western scholar to study the Tibetan grammatical tradition, and along with F. W. Thomas (1867–1956) belonged to the first generation of scholars to study the Old Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts. Bacot made frequent use of Tibetan informants. He acquired aid from Gendün Chöphel in studying Dunhuang manuscripts.

Henry Hugh Peter Deasy

Henry Hugh Peter Deasy was an Irish army officer, founder of the Deasy Motor Car Company and a writer.

Heinrich Harrer

Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian mountaineer, sportsman, geographer, Oberscharführer in the Schutzstaffel, and author. He was a member of the four-man climbing team that made the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, the “last problem” of the Alps. He wrote the books Seven Years in Tibet (1952) and The White Spider (1959).

George Patterson (missionary)

George Neilson Patterson also known as Khampa Gyau and Patterson of Tibet, was a Scottish engineer and missionary who served as medical officer and diplomatic representative of the Tibetan resistance movement during the Annexation of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China.

George Bogle (diplomat)

George Bogle was a Scottish adventurer and diplomat, the first to establish diplomatic relations with Tibet and to attempt recognition by the Chinese Qing dynasty. His mission is still used today as a reference point in debates between China and Tibetan independence activists.

Frank Ludlow

Frank Ludlow OBE was an English officer stationed in the British Mission at Lhasa and a naturalist.

Christoph Baumer

Christoph Baumer is a Swiss scholar and explorer. From 1984 onwards, he has conducted explorations in Central Asia, China, Tibet and the Caucasus, the results of which have been published in numerous books, scholarly publications, TV and radio programs.

Archibald Steele

Archibald Trojan Steele was an American foreign or war correspondent for United Press, The New York Times, the Chicago Daily News and the New York Herald Tribune. He covered China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa from the early 1930s until his retirement in 1960. He then published several books, and is known for filing reports of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937 that first informed the world of the activities of the Japanese Army.

Alexandra David-Néel

Alexandra David-Néel was a Belgian–French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet, when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet, which was published in 1929. Her teachings influenced the beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the popularisers of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts and Ram Dass, and the esotericist Benjamin Creme.

William Woodville Rockhill

William Woodville Rockhill was a United States diplomat, best known as the author of the U.S.’s Open Door Policy for China, the first American to learn to speak Tibetan, and one of the West’s leading experts on the modern political history of China.