Born in Tenterden, Kent, Lansdell was the son of a schoolmaster and home schooled before attending St John's College in Highbury, north London.

He distributed multi-lingual religious tracts and bibles provided by London missionary societies wherever he went, most notably in prisons and hospitals in Siberia and central Asia.

Eleanor Marx chided “his optimist views of Russian prisons” in her own review in the March edition of the socialist magazine Progress.

[6] Such activities sometimes aroused the suspicions of the Russian authorities and on one occasion he was arrested while travelling on the Perm Railway after it was thought he was distributing revolutionary pamphlets.

[9] He was the author of a number of books including Chinese Central Asia: A Ride to Little Tibet, which ran to five editions in English and was also translated into German, Danish, and Swedish.

He travelled from Lake Balkash through Kashgar to Little Tibet (now known as Baltistan) by horse and yak at heights of up to 18,000 feet (5,500 m), in the process crossing the entire mountain systems of Central Asia.

[10] Lansdell's objective was to deliver a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Dalai Lama, which he hoped would grant him access to the then closed capital of Tibet at Lhasa.