Younghusband, Sir Francis Edward

Younghusband, Sir Francis Edward, 1863–1942, British explorer, b. India. He explored Manchuria in 1886. The following year he journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass (alt. c.19,000 ft/5,791 m) of the Karakorum range. Lord Curzon, the British viceroy in India, sent Younghusband with a military expedition into Tibet in 1904, where he forced a treaty upon the Dalai Lama, opening Tibet to Western trade. Later he surveyed the Brahmaputra and Sutlej rivers and the upper reaches of the Indus. He three times tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest. His books include Heart of a Continent (1898), India and Tibet (1912), and Everest: The Challenge (1936).

See biography by G. Seaver (1953); P. Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa (1961).

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