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The forbidden city of Lhasa has held a special fascination for explorers since two Jesuit missionaries, John Grueber and Albert d'Orville, became the first Europeans to reach it in 1661. They travelled from Peking, being unable to return to Macao where they had entered China, and arrived in Lhasa only twenty years after it became Tibet's capital. Although they spent barely a month there, Grueber's descriptions of the Potala, "a castle built on a high mountain, after the European fashion", the exotic clothes and customs of the court and the strange habits of the common people, who ate raw meat and never washed, sparked one of the burning obsessions of exploration.

The next to arrive was another Jesuit, Ippolito Desideri, who travelled up from India and stayed for five years from 1715, but whose account remained unpublished for nearly two hundred years. The Capuchins who came after him during the following twenty five years reported little and no one managed to enter after the last monk left in 1745, so that by the 19th century Tibet had become the most mysterious, unknown and therefore desirable land in the world.

Many tried to reach Lhasa but none succeeded until, in 1811, an eccentric English scholar called Thomas Manning, ignoring the fact that he had been refused permission, rode up to the Potala wearing a heavy but ineffective disguise. "We passed under a large gateway whose gilded ornaments at the top were so ill-fixed that some leaned one way and some another, and reduced the whole to the rock appearance of castles and turrets in pasty-work.... If the palace had exceeded my expectations, the town as far fell short of them. There is nothing striking, nothing pleasing in its appearance. The habitations are begrimed with smut and dirt. The avenues are full of dogs, some growling and gnawing bits of hide which lie about in profusion, and emit a charnel-house smell; others limping and looking livid..." Surprisingly, he was allowed to stay for five months and to have an audience with the seven year old Dalai Lama before he was thrown out.

Two more missionaries, French Lazarists this time, made the arduous journey from China, taking eighteen months to arrive in 1846. They stayed less than two months and were struck by the crowds "all is excitement, and noise, and pushing, and competition, every single soul in the place being ardently occupied in the grand business of buying and selling... the streets, always crowded with pilgrims and traders, present a marvellous variety of physiognomies, costumes and languages."

No other European reached the city until the end of the century, although the great Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky made four determined attempts. Instead, a remarkable series of Indian surveyors, known as "Pundits", were trained and equipped to gather the information denied to the British. Suffering appalling hardships and risking dreadful tortures and death if caught, they walked for thousands of miles recording distances, altitudes and bearings with measured paces and concealed thermometers and sextants. Though often disbelieved and sometimes vanishing for several years, their findings were astonishingly accurate and contributed vastly to the Survey of India. They were poorly rewarded though one, Nain Singh, was awarded the RGS's Patron's Medal in 1877. In his address the then President of the RGS, Sir Rutherford Alcock, credited Nain Singh with determining the position of Lhasa and thanked him for adding "so largely to our knowledge of that portion of Asia which no European could explore."

Only in 1899 did a Russian student, Gombozhab Tsybikov, manage to enter disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and stay for a year undiscovered to gather detailed information on the country. When another Russian, Agran Dorjiev, became one of the Dalai Lama's teachers and later his political advisor, the British became alarmed. In 1904 Colonel Francis Younghusband was dispatched with a thousand well-armed troops. They slaughtered the Tibetan soldiers who opposed them and reached Lhasa to negotiate the Anglo-Tibetan Treaty. This brought Tibet within the British sphere of interest where it remained until Indian independence in 1947.

The first European woman to enter Lhasa, and perhaps the last person to do so as a true explorer, was the brave French scholar and lama in her own right, Alexandra David-Neel. When, at last, she has overcome every obstacle and reached a "ramshackle cottage occupied by beggarly people" under the walls of the Potala, she utters a paean that expresses all the urges which drive an explorer on. "Although I had endeavoured to reach the Tibetan capital rather because I had been challenged than out of any real desire to visit it, now that I stood on the forbidden ground at the cost of so much hardship and danger, I meant to enjoy myself in all possible ways... I would climb to the top of the Potala itself; I would visit the most famous shrines, the large historical monasteries in the vicinity of Lhasa, and I would witness the religious ceremonies, the races, the pageants of the New Year festival. All sights, all things which are Lhasa's own beauty and peculiarity, would have to be seen by the lone woman explorer who had had the nerve to come to them from afar, the first of her sex. It was my well-won reward after the trials on the road and the vexations by which for several years various officials had endeavoured to prevent my wanderings in Tibet. This time I intended that nobody should deprive me of it."

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