Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (31 May 1863 – 31 July 1942) was a British Army officer, explorer and spiritual writer. He is remembered for his travels in the Far East and Central Asia; especially the 1904 British expedition to Tibet, led by him, and for his writings on Asia and foreign policy. Younghusband held positions including British commissioner to Tibet and president of the Royal Geographical Society.
Early life Francis Younghusband was born on 31 May 1863 to a British military family at Murree, Punjab, British India (now Pakistan), the second son of Major-General John William Younghusband and his wife Clara Jane Shaw who were married at Freshford, Somerset near Bath, Somerset in 1856. His maternal uncle, Robert Shaw, was a noted explorer of Central Asia. His paternal uncle, Lieutenant-General Charles Younghusband CB FRS, was a British Army officer and meteorologist. His brother was Major-General George Younghusband. Many other members of his family were serving army officers in India.
As an infant, Francis was taken to live in England by his mother. When Clara returned to India in 1867 she left her son to be educated by two of his strictly religious aunts, Anne and Eliza Younghusband, who were educating several other British children from Bengal at the family home in Freshford, Somerset near Bath, Somerset. In 1870 his mother and father returned to England, although Francis is still recorded on the 1871 census as living with his aunts. In 1876 at age thirteen, Francis entered Clifton College, Bristol. In 1881 he entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was commissioned as a subaltern in the 1st King's Dragoon Guards in May 1882.
Military career In 1886–1887, on leave from his regiment, Younghusband made an expedition across Asia though still a young officer. After sailing to China his party set out, with Colonel Mark Bell's permission, to cross 1200 miles of desert with the ostensible authority to survey the geography; but in reality, the purposes were to ascertain the strength of the Russian physical threats to the Raj. Departing Peking with a senior colleague, Henry E. M. James (on leave from his Indian Civil Service position) and a young British consular officer from Newchwang, Harry English Fulford, on 4 April 1887, Lieut Younghusband explored Manchuria, visiting the frontier areas of Chinese settlement in the region of the Changbai Mountains.
On arrival in India, he was granted three months' leave by the Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Lord Roberts; the scientific results of this travel would prove vital information to the Royal Geographical Society. Younghusband had already carried out numerous scientific observations in particular, showing that the Changbai Mountains' highest peak, Baekdu Mountain, is only around 8,000 feet tall, even though the travellers' British maps showed [nonexistent] snow-capped peaks 10,000-12,000 ft tall in the area.)) Younghusband crossed the most inhospitable terrain in the world to the Himalayas before being ordered to make his way home. Parting with his British companions, he crossed the Taklamakan Desert to Chinese Turkestan, and pioneered a route from Kashgar to India through the uncharted Mustagh Pass.Younghusband, Francis E. (1896). The Heart of a Continent, pp. 58-290. John Murray, London. Facsimile reprint: (2005) Elbiron Classics. He reported to the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, his crossing through the Karakoram Range, the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs and where the range converged with the Himalayas; the nexus of three great empires. In the 1880s the region of the Upper Oxus was still largely unmapped. For this achievement, aged still only 24, he was elected the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society and received the society's 1890 Patron's Medal.
In February 1889, he was made captain and was dispatched with a small escort of Gurkha soldiers to investigate an uncharted region north of Ladakh, where raiders from Hunza had disrupted trade between Yarkand and India the previous year.The Heart of a Continent, pp. 186ff Whilst encamped in the valley of the Yarkand River, Younghusband received a messenger at his camp, inviting him to dinner with Captain Bronislav Grombchevsky, his Russian counterpart in "The Great Game". Younghusband accepted the invitation to Grombchevsky's camp, and after dinner the two rivals talked into the night, sharing brandy and vodka, and discussing the possibility of a Russian invasion of British India. Grombchevsky impressed Younghusband with the horsemanship skills of his Cossack escort, and Younghusband impressed Grombchevsky with the rifle drill of his Gurkhas.The Heart of a Continent, pp. 234ff After their meeting in this remote frontier region, Grombchevsky resumed his expedition in the direction of Tibet and Younghusband continued his exploration of the Karakoram.
Indian Political Service career Younghusband received a telegram from Simla, to attend the Intelligence Department (ID) to be interviewed by Foreign Secretary Sir Mortimer Durand, transferred to the Indian Political Service. He served as a political officer on secondment from the British Army. He refused a request to visit Lhasa as an interpreter, disguised as a Yarkandi trader, a cover not guaranteed to fool the Russians, after Andrew Dalgleish, a Scots merchant, had been hacked to death. Younghusband was accompanied by a Gurkha escort, celebrated for their ferocity in combat. The Forward policy was circumscribed by a legal offer to all travellers of peaceable security crossing borders. Departure from Leh on 8 August 1889 on the caravan route took them up the mountain pass of Shimshal towards Hunza, his aim being to restore the tea trade to Xinjiang and prevent any further raids into Kashmir. Colonel Durand from Gilgit joined him. Younghusband probed the villages to gauge the reception: calculating it was a den of thieves, they ascended the steep ravine. The Hunza was barred to them, a trap was sprung; the parley terms took him inside to negotiate. The nervous reception over, they were all relieved to find safety; Younghusband wanted to know who was waylaying innocent civilian traders, and why. The ruler, Safdar Ali extended a letter of welcome to his Kashmiri kingdom; the British investigated whence came the Russian infiltrators under Agent Gromchevsky. Further south at Ladakh, he kept a close watch on their movements. Reluctantly, Younghusband dined with the Cossack leaders, who divulged the secrets of their common rivalry. Gromchevsky explained that the Raj had invited enmity for meddling in the Black Sea ports. The Russian displayed little grasp of strategy, but basic raw courage; he betrayed the confidence of Abdul Rahman as no friend to the British. Younghusband tentatively concluded that their possessions at Bokhara and Samarkand were vulnerable. Having drunk large quantities of vodka and brandy, the Cossacks presented arms in cordial salute and they parted in peace. Woefully unprepared for winter, the British garrison at Ladakh refused them entry.
Younghusband finally arrived at Gulmit to a 13-gun salute. In khaki, the envoy greeted Safdar Ali at the marquee on the Karakoram Highway, the men of Hunza kneeling at their ruler's feet. This was colonial diplomacy, based on protocol and etiquette, but Younghusband had not come for merely trivial discussions. Reinforced by Durand's troops, Younghusband's arguments were to prevent criminal looting, murder, and highway robbery. Impervious to reason though Safdar Ali was, Younghusband was not prepared to allow him to laugh at the Raj. A demonstration of firepower "caused quite a sensation", he wrote in his diaries. The British major was disdainful, but content when he left on 23 November to return to India, which he reached by Christmas.
In 1890, Younghusband was sent on a mission to Chinese Turkestan, accompanied by George Macartney as interpreter. He spent the winter in Kashgar, where he left Macartney as British consul.Dictionary of National Biography "Sir George Macartney" Younghusband sought to investigate the Pamir Gap, a possible Russian entry route to India, but first needed to address issues with the Chinese authorities in Kashgar. It was for this reason he recruited a Mandarin interpreter, junior officer George Macartney, to accompany his missions into the frozen mountains. They wintered in Kashgar as a listening post, meeting in conference with the Russian Nikolai Petrovsky, who had always resisted trade with Xinjiang (Sinkiang). The Russian agent was well-informed about British India, but proved unscrupulous. Believing he had succeeded, Younghusband did not reckon on Petrovsky's deal with the Taotai of Xinjiang.
In July 1891, they were still in the Pamirs when news reached them that the Russians intended to send troops "to note and report with the Chinese and Afghans". At Bozai Gumbaz in the Little Pamir on 12 August he encountered Cossack soldiers, who forced him to leave the area. This was one of the incidents which provoked the Hunza-Nagar Campaign. The troop of 20 or so soldiers planted a flag on what they anticipated was unclaimed territory, 150 miles south of the Russian border. However, the British considered the area to be Afghan territory. Colonel Yonov, decorated with the Order of St George, approached his camp to announce that the area now belonged to the Tsar. Younghusband learnt that they had raided the Chitral territory; furthermore, they had penetrated the Darkot Pass into the Yasin Valley. They were joined by eager intelligence officer Lieutenant Davison, but the British were disabused by Ivanov of British sovereignty: Younghusband remained polite, maintained protocol but hospitable to the big Russian bear hug.
During his service in Kashmir, he wrote a book called Kashmir at the request of Edward M. J. Molyneux. Younghusband's descriptions went hand in glove with Molyneux's paintings of the valley. In the book, Younghusband declared his immense admiration of the natural beauty of Kashmir and its history. Younghusband participated in the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and Russia, known as 'The Great Game,' which persisted into the 20th century before being formally concluded by the 1907 Anglo-Russian Treaty. Younghusband, among other explorers such as Sven Hedin, Nikolay Przhevalsky, Shoqan Walikhanov and Sir Marc Aurel Stein, had participated in earnest. Rumours of Russian expansion into the Hindu Kush with a Russian presence in Tibet prompted the new Viceroy of India Lord Curzon to appoint Younghusband, by then a major, British commissioner to Tibet from 1902 to 1904.
Expedition to Tibet
In 1903, Curzon appointed Younghusband as the head of the Tibet Frontier Commission; John Claude White, the political officer of Sikkim, and E. C. Wilton, served as his deputy commissioners in the commission. Younghusband subsequently led the British expedition to Tibet, which had the putative aim of settling disputes over the Sikkim–Tibet border, but eventually exceeded instructions from Younghusband's superiors and became a de facto invasion. Roughly inside Tibet, on the way to Gyantse, thence to the capital of Lhasa, Younghusband's troops defeated 600–700 Tibetan troops near the hamlet of Guru. The expedition's troops, equipped with rifles and machine guns, easily routed the poorly-equipped Tibetan forces, who were armed with hoes, swords, and flintlocks.Morris, James: Farewell the Trumpets (Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 102.