Father António de Andrade (1580 – 1634) was a Jesuit priest and explorer from Portugal. _ From 1600 until his death in 1634 he was engaged in missionary activity in India. Andrade was the first known European to have crossed the Himalayas and reached Tibet, establishing the first Catholic mission on Tibetan soil.
Andrade returned to Tibet in 1625 and was joined by other Jesuit missionaries. They succeeded in building a church and made many converts, aided by support from the king and other members of the royal family.
Andrade returned to India in 1629; the mission foundered soon afterward, with the invasion of Guge by Ladakh, the death of the pro-missionary king and the installation of a hostile Ladakhi-controlled government in Tsaparang
Estevao Cacella was born in Aviz, Portugal, in 1585, joined the Jesuits at the age of nineteen, and sailed for India in 1614 where he worked for some years in Kerala .
In 1626, Father Cacella and Father João Cabral, another younger Jesuit priest, travelled from Cochin to Bengal where they spent six months preparing for a journey through Bhutan, which would eventually take them to Tibet where they founded a mission in the town Shigatse (near the River Brahmaputra), the residence of the Panchen Lama and of the great Tibetan monastery of Tashilhunpo. Cacella arrived in Shigatse in November 1627 and Cabral followed in January 1628.
Although the Jesuits were well received and had high hopes for the success of the mission in Shigatse, it only lasted a few years. Father Cacella's poor health led to his death during 1630 in the high Tibetan platea
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