Clifford M. Foust - Muscovite and Mandarin: Russias Trade with China and Its Setting, 1727-1805

Russias Trade with China and Its Setting, 1727-1805

Clifford M. Foust

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This study was begun as a general investigation of Russian relations with China in the final three-quarters of the eighteenth century. In the beginning I intended to inquire into the entire spectrum of events and episodes in that intercourse, including diplomatic, commercial, and cultural matters. Chinese actions and reactions were to be treated equally with Russian ones; the aim was to construct an historical synthesis of these differing societies encountering one another. This original aim was eroded in the very process of historical investigation. Another set of objectives almost completely replaced those I began with.

What came to seem important to me was not so much the encounter itself of these two societies and their governmental and commercial representatives, although that encounter does have a fascinating and at times exciting history, but the historical dynamics of one or the other of these parties to a meeting of East and West. To try to make complete sense of both parties and to describe both meaningfully would likely prove to be unsatisfying at best and unimportant at worst. I determined to focus primarily on Russia, Russian acts and decisions, Russian motivations, and Russian dynamics of expansion.

The primary emphasis on Russian commercial relations with the Chinese also emerged only in the process of research and writing. I am now convinced that, in these early years of Russian interaction with the Chinese, trade was the dominant goal of most Russians, both state and private persons. For most Russians all else was subordinate. Yet the commerce that grew in the eighteenth century was intimately affected by a variety of factors and matters of noneconomic character. Decisions made in St. Petersburg and the accommodations agreed upon by Russian and Chinese diplomats and courts not only affected, but at times dictated, the circumstances, condition, and size of trade. Such things as the location of the borders, the control of runaways and deserters across established frontiers, the residence of Russian priests and students in Peking, and the forms of diplomatic correspondence, all at one time or another disturbed the relations between Russia and China, and as a consequence impinged on trade. Sometimes the impact was so great that trade was cut off for years. Were these noncommercial matters well known and chronicled it could be argued that they should not be dealt with as fully as I have done here. But they are almost completely unknown, especially to the Englishreading audience. Russian trade with China is therefore seen, throughout this study, in a setting of noncommercial events, decisions, and factors.

Russians went to China to exchange goods for profit. Both state official and private trader went for that purpose. Until roughly the mid-eighteenth century, the Russian state monopolized a variety of goods marketed in China and reserved for itself all trade in the Chinese capital. Private merchants (after 1727) were limited to border trade. Hence Russian trade with China must be presented as an instance of rivalry between state commercial monopoly (sometimes the state operated the monopoly and sometimes it farmed it out to private entrepreneurs) and private commerce. This does not suggest that this rivalry in the China trade may be taken as a microcosm of Russian experience in economic enterprise in the eighteenth century. Certainly much of what is examined here has applicability to the general economic history of eighteenth-century Russia, but in a variety of ways the China trade was a special casedistant, exotic, chancey, discriminatively administered by the state, and participated in by a breed of traders (both state and private) of unusual cut. After the Treaty of Kiakhta (1727), the Russian states involvement in the China trade was great and persistent. Hence considerable emphasis is laid here on state policy and state regulation of its own monopolies and of private trade. This emphasis has also required the explanation of changes in the administrative and governmental structure, both in St. Petersburg and in eastern Siberia, that affected trade.

This monograph begins fairly abruptly with the year 1727. In that year a new treatythe Treaty of Kiakhtareplaced the earlier and better known Treaty of Nerchinsk. The Kiakhta agreements significantly and substantially altered the conditions and terms of trade between Russia and China, among other things clearly establishing the distinction between commerce carried on in the Chinese capital and that conducted at the border. New patterns of trade replaced the older ones, and the Kiakhta system, as one author puts it to draw comparisons with the Canton system, developed. That system was further defined later in the eighteenth century and thereafter remained much the same until the mid-nineteenth century.

This account is concluded in the early years of the nineteenth century because, by that time, the arrangements for trade and the agreements on noneconomic differences were set. They remained largely unchanged until after the stunning defeats suffered by the Chinese in the Anglo-Chinese Wars. Between 1803 and 1806 the Russians attempted to change those patterns drastically but, with the adamant refusal of the Chinese, they made no further effort until the world situation of China had altered dramatically.

Russian-Chinese relations, including trade, have been comparatively closely studied for the seventeenth century and the Petrine period. By far the finest work yet published is that of M. Gaston Cahen.1 Although over a half a century old, it stands well the ravages of academic time. His study ends with the Treaty of Kiakhta and the subsequent Chinese embassies to Russia. A recent and most promising study, Professor Mark Mancalls doctoral dissertation on Sino-Russian relations prior to 1728, has, unfortunately, been unavailable to me.2 The nineteenth century, also, has been treated in considerable detail, although by no means thoroughly dredged.

Hence, the main subject of this monograph is Russian trade in China and with the Chinese. It may be taken as a selective study in Russian economic and entrepreneural history of the eighteenth century, although I have made no particular effort to fit the China trade into the broader picture. It is too early to do that in a systematic way, for eighteenth-century Russia still very badly needs much monographic treatment before even the general patterns of the economy emerge. This is particularly true for the post-Petrine period, as persuasively argued by Professor Arcadius Kahan in his recent articles.3

By the same token, I have made no attempt at comparative history. It is left to others to contrast Russian penetration of the East with that of the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, and later the Americans. There is a very great deal that can be done in the comparative study of Europeans in East Asia, and it seems obvious on the surface of it that such study will reveal important insights into the nature and flavor of the societies back home.

No exceptional problems arose in the transliteration of Russian and Chinese. The Wade-Giles system, in spite of its archaisms, has been used for Chinese. For Russian, the Library of Congress system was employed, with the usual simplifications, such as the omission of ligatures. In almost all things, the advice of J. Thomas Shaw was found sound and sensible.4 Manchu and Mongol names and terms proved to be a far greater problem, since transliteration of these languages has not yet stabilized in the academic world. Mongol is here transliterated by the convention adopted for Arthur Hummels great compilation of the lives of Ching dynasty personages.5 Where this was not possible, the Chinese form, in the Wade-Giles system, was substituted, a somewhat unhappy device defensible on at least one groundthat the Mongols of that time are usually as well known in Chinese texts as in Mongol. Manchu names and terms are, contrarily, usually given in Wade-Giles transliteration, with the Manchu form following on first occurrence. The only justification for this practice is that Manchus (and even Manchu terms) are best known in the Ching period through Chinese texts.