This paper considers the adaptive containment control of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with nonlinear parameterisation. Without imposing any conditions on the unknown nonlinearities and unknown parameters, the distributed controllers are constructed recursively with only neighbours' information by using the backstepping design method. Under the assumption that the leaders set is globally reachable, it is shown that all the signals of the closed-loop systems are global uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB), and all the followers will exponentially converge to the convex hull spanned by the dynamic leaders with adjustable tracking errors. Finally, two simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the control scheme.