ABSTRACT
In the late summer of 1890 two young Englishmen sat with their hosts to be photographed in Yarkand, an oasis town of Chinese Turkestan. Their impeccable European clothes and sun helmets were in bizarre contrast with the blue silk jackets, pork-pie hats and long robes of their Chinese hosts, and the assorted garb of their Turki attendants. Dominating the group with his military bearing and imperious gaze was Captain Francis Younghusband, then twenty-seven years old, but already a veteran explorer of Central Asia. His was a figure that could have been photographed anywhere in the British empire in that last decade of the nineteenth century; his stiff carriage and stern expression gave an air of supreme self-confidence, even arrogance, which not even his status as a guest of the Manchu empire could subdue.
