Jafar Khan was born in the 1790s in Farahan,[1] a region in central Iran notable for its high literacy and proficiency in statesmanship.

[4] Their journey to England, referred to as a wanderjahren by the modern historian Nile Green, was an interchange of ideas, which had been made by possible by the diplomatic exchanges between Iran and Great Britain.

He spent several years in Tabriz until 1836, when he was appointed by Mohammad Shah Qajar (r. 1834–1848) as the Iranian ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople.

One of the events that occurred during this tenure was the attack on the Iranian town of Mohammerah by Ali Reza Pasha, the Ottoman governor of the Baghdad Eyalet.

As a result Jafar Khan went back to Iran, where he urged the prime minister Haji Mirza Aqasi to capture the city of Baghdad.

[4] To avoid these types of occurrences, Iran and the Ottoman Empire agreed to start negotiations to demarcate their borders in 1844.

In September 1858, Naser al-Din Shah dismissed Mirza Aqa Khan Nuri as his prime minister.