Peking to Kashmir by the Mustagh Pass

Francis Younghusband · 1887 CE · Earth

Peking to Kashmir by the Mustagh Pass — Francis Younghusband · 1887 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Return overland from China to India, crossing the Gobi and the Karakoram and reporting on the passes.

Historical context

The Great Game had made the passes between Chinese Turkestan and British India a military question, and no one on either side knew which of them a force could actually use. Younghusband, a subaltern of twenty-four with seven months of leave, proposed to find out by going home the long way. He came back with a crossing of the Karakoram that the Survey had thought impossible and with a reputation that would carry him, seventeen years later, to Lhasa at the head of a column of troops.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Leave to go home

    1887 CE

    A subaltern of twenty-four asks permission to return to India the long way, and gets it.

  2. Seventy days of Gobi

    1887 CE

    With eight camels and a Chinese caravan master he crosses the desert in the summer heat.

  3. Hami

    1887 CE

    Out of the gravel and into melons, poplars and irrigation channels.

  4. Turfan below sea level

    1887 CE

    He rides through the hottest place in China, where the water runs underground.

  5. Yarkand and the choice of pass

    1887 CE

    Balti traders tell him of an old route over the mountains that nobody now uses.

  6. The Mustagh Pass

    20 September 1887

    On 20 September they go down an ice wall on steps cut with a pickaxe.

  7. Down the Baltoro

    1887 CE

    Below the pass he walks out along one of the great glaciers of the world, under K2.

  8. Srinagar, November

    November 1887

    Seven months and six thousand kilometres after Peking, he walks into Kashmir.

Outcome

Reached Srinagar in November 1887 after some 6,000 kilometres and the first recorded crossing of the Mustagh Pass from the north.

Francis Younghusband

British officer who crossed Asia from Peking to Kashmir at twenty-four by an abandoned Karakoram pass, and who seventeen years later forced Tibet open at the head of an armed mission.

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Sources

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