Christianity recognises no worldly boundaries to the spread of the Faith and its missionaries’ dreams of converting the Tibetans can be traced back to the late 8th century. The then Patriarch of the Nestorian Christians, Timothy 1 of Baghdad, considered that little-known land to be under his jurisdiction and moved to appoint an apostolate to Tibet. But while Nestorians, and later Catholic emissaries to the court of the Mongol Khans, may have reached the fringes of the Tibetan world, the first recorded direct encounters between Christian West and Buddhist Tibet were not until the 17th century.

Following rumours of a lost Christian kingdom in the Himalayas, Jesuit monks made concerted efforts to penetrate Tibet and they established a mission at Tsaparang in western Tibet from 1624-40. Two Jesuits also travelled through Bhutan to Shigatse in central Tibet in 1628, and in 1661 the Jesuits Grueber and d’Orville became the first Europeans known to have visited Lhasa. In the early 18th century, the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri remained in Lhasa from 1716-21, by which time the Capuchins had established a mission there which functioned intermittently between 1707 and 1745. As will be seen, the Capuchins found their rudimentary medical knowledge a useful means of gaining support from their hosts, although more than a century was to pass before this became an explicit missionary strategy.

Tibet was then open to any foreigners able to overcome the logistical difficulties of travel there, and in the 18th century, Dutch and French traders reached Lhasa, while British East India Company emissaries were entertained in Shigatse. But the closing decades of that century witnessed the increasing suspicion in Asia of the growing power of the European nations. When the Nepalese invaded Tibet in 1788 the British were suspected of aiding them, and in 1793, after the Qing Emperor's armies had expelled the Nepalese, the Manchu dynasty establish its political authority over Tibet and closed its borders to Europeans. While Chinese authority over Tibet weakened over the next century, the two governments co-operated in maintaining this policy of isolation until it was temporarily ended by the Younghusband mission of 1903-04.

Paradoxically, Tibet's policy of isolation only served to increase its appeal to the West.