Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer

Sir Francis Younghusband was the last of the great imperialists and a dashing adventurer. In 1903 he single-handedly turned a small diplomatic mission into a full-scale military invasion of the last unexplored country on earth, Tibet. Yet he subsequently became an outlandish mystical philosopher and an Indian nationalist.

Admired by Bertrand Russell, Lord Curzon, H. G. Wells and John Buchan, Younghusband held the world record for the 300-yard dash, was The Times correspondent during the siege of Chitral, became the first European since Marco Polo to find a new overland route from China to India, and organized the early assaults on Mount Everest.

In a life that provides a rare glimpse into the spirit of his times, Younghusband embraced and personified, without apparent contradiction, the two cultures of late British imperialism. He spent much of his early life as a leading player in the Great Game - the battle of wits for control over the uncharted territory of High Asia - and his presumed death as a spy in the Pamirs almost sparked off a war between British India and Tsarist Russia. But despite being a classic Edwardian, full of pomposity and repression, in the post-First World War era he led the way in religious, philosophical and sexual free-thinking.