Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta was born at Xavier Castle in Navarre to the noble Jasso family — his father was the chancellor of the kingdom of Navarre during its last years of independence. He was sent to the University of Paris at nineteen to study philosophy, and met there his fellow Basque countryman Ignatius of Loyola, who patiently won him to the new spiritual project. He was among the seven companions who, on August 15, 1534, at the chapel of Montmartre, took the foundational vows of the Society of Jesus.
In 1540 Pope Paul III formally confirmed the Society. Almost immediately King John III of Portugal, hearing of the new order, requested missionaries for his Asian colonies. Francis Xavier was sent — at thirty-five — as Apostolic Nuncio for all the Portuguese East. He sailed from Lisbon in April 1541 and arrived at Goa in May 1542. For the next ten and a half years he laboured ceaselessly across Asia: the Pearl Fishery Coast of southeastern India (1542–43), Malacca (1545), the Spice Islands and Moluccas (1546–47), and Japan — where he landed at Kagoshima on August 15, 1549, the first Christian missionary to set foot in Japan.
He learnt enough Japanese to translate the basic catechism and to preach to the noble families of Yamaguchi and Bungo. In 1551 he returned to Goa to organize the Asian Jesuit province, then set out again — this time to reach China, the cultural source of the East Asian civilization he was now convinced he had to reach. He died on Shangchuan Island, a small island off the Chinese coast, on December 3, 1552, alone in a hut, awaiting a smuggler who would carry him into the closed Ming Empire. His body, transferred to Goa in 1553, was found incorrupt and remains so — vested in his missionary cassock — in the silver coffin of the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa, where it has been the principal pilgrimage shrine of Asian Catholicism for over four hundred and seventy years. Canonized 1622.