THERE have been many pretexts during British colonial history for sending troops where they didn't belong, but Lord Curzon's official reason for ordering the invasion of Tibet in 1903 was among the most outlandish.
'We now learn that Tibetan troops attacked Nepalese yaks on the frontier and carried many of them off. This is an overt act of hostility,' wrote the Viceroy of India in a dispatch to London.
The result was a military action that began with a British army force camped first over the border to persuade Tibetan officials to enter into talks and ended with that force marching pugnaciously into Lhasa after negotiations, to their delight, failed to even begin. At the head of this foray was Francis Younghusband, former explorer turned frustrated minor official in Imperial India, and, despite his relatively humble station, friend and adviser to the ambitious Curzon.
Patrick French, at 29, a highly talented researcher and entertaining writer, uses this expedition as the centrepiece of his 400-page biography and as the most obvious of the many contradictions that pepper the story of a man he describes as the 'last great imperial adventurer'.
By the end of his life, Younghusband was calling for self-rule for India, for tolerance for all religions and for the study by the West of Eastern ways which, as an old man, he found superior to much on offer in 1930s Britain.
But in 1903 he held no such views and neither he nor the man who sent him blundering into an isolated secretive kingdom ever appear to have admitted the hypocrisy the expedition eventually illuminated.
