Frederick Marshman Bailey CIE FRGS (3 February 1882 – 17 April 1967) was a British political officer and one of the last protagonists of The Great Game.

[1] His expeditions in Tibet and Assam Himalaya gave him many opportunities to pursue his hobbies of photography, butterfly collecting and trophy hunting in the high Tibetan region.

In 1911, he crossed China and southern Tibet to Assam in a failed attempt to reach the 150 ft falls on the Yarlung Tsangpo, which had been reported by the Indian pundit Kinthup.

It was in that valley that Bailey spotted a tall blue poppy at the margin of the forest and pressed it in his notebook, now called Meconopsis baileyi.

He was sent back to India, where he served as Political Officer on the North-West Frontier during the Mohmand Operations January 1916 to March 1917.

One of Bailey's more well-known adventures occurred in 1918, when he travelled to Tashkent in Central Asia on a mission to discover the intentions of the new Bolshevik government, specifically in relation to India.

During the mission, he also shadowed Raja Mahendra Pratap, an Indian nationalist who had established the Provisional Government of India in Kabul in 1915.

Bailey eventually had to flee for his life from the city and escaped only by taking on the guise of an Austrian prisoner-of-war[11] and joining the Cheka with an assignment to find a rogue British agent, himself.

He was the Political Officer for Sikkim and Tibet, stationed in Gangtok (Sikkim) from June 1921 to October 1928, and he made annual visits to Tibet to inspect the Gyantse Trade Agency and visited Lhasa from 16 July to 16 August 1924, accompanied by the Medical Officer, Major J. Hislop IMS.

Bailey arranged passports and encouraged them to search the 40 mi unexplored gap of the river to solve the riddles of the Tsangpo Gorges.

He retired from the Indian Army on 3 February 1937 and, during the Second World War, served as a King's Messenger to Central and South America between 1942 and 1943.