December, 1903. A border dispute escalates amid rumors of a proposed secret alliance between Russia and the religious monarchy at Lhasa. British Colonel Francis Younghusband marches his Indian troops north with a battalion of coolies and special correspondent for The Daily Mail Edmund Candler in tow. It was a thrilling new chapter in the "Great Game" of Asian colonial supremacy, which sent the men deep into the heart of a region that few outsiders had ever lived to recount.