Michel Peissel, Tibet Scholar and Adventurer, Dies at 74 (original) (raw)
Europe|Michel Peissel, Tibet Expert and Adventurer, Dies at 74
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Michel Peissel wrote 16 books and made more than 20 documentary films about his travels to remote regions of the world.Credit...Geri Bauer Photographics/Henry Holt
- Oct. 15, 2011
PARIS — Michel Peissel, a French explorer and an ethnologist who devoted a good part of his life to recording the culture of Tibet and led numerous expeditions to seldom-traveled places, died on Oct. 7 at his home in Paris. He was 74.
The cause was a heart attack, his son Jocelyn said.
In 16 books and more than 20 documentary films, Mr. Peissel chronicled his explorations of inaccessible or ignored regions of the globe, including the Tibetan high plateau, remote Russian river towns and unrecorded Mayan ruins.
Educated in England and France, Mr. Peissel (pronounced payss-EL) dropped out of Harvard Business School to become an explorer and follow his dream of understanding the peoples of Tibet, many of whom lived in regions closed to foreigners.
Probing what he called historical Greater Tibet, he gained access to the Mustang region in the early 1960s; this led to his book “Mustang: A Lost Tibetan Kingdom.” Its follow-up, “Cavaliers of Kham,” created an even greater stir with its narrative of the secretive Tibetan Khampa guerrillas, who attacked Chinese troops with C.I.A. support.
Traveling on foot and on horseback, with pack animals hauling supplies, he and his Sherpas, sometimes with family or friends, slogged for months on end through little-researched places like Ladakh and Zanskar. In Zanskar, Mr. Peissel found two brothers sharing the role of king and wrote “Zanskar: The Hidden Kingdom.” After years of wangling for permission, he managed to cross reclusive Bhutan.
“You can call me an adventurer, a man with a lot of curiosity,” he told The New York Times in an interview in 2007. He was also a photographer, a painter, an inventor of various contraptions, a linguist and an ebullient storyteller.
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