"Kitai" and the Ch'ing Empire in Seventeenth Century Russian Documents on China

- 21 - "KITAI" AND THE CH'ING EMPIRE IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY RUSSIAN DOCUMENTS ON CHINA By Eric Widmer Brown University For most of this century the picture available in the west of early Sino-Russian relations has depended largely on the two expensive volumes of Baddeley, published in 1919. The contributions 2 3 of Pavlovsky and Sebes have given more color to this picture (which if nothing else deserves color), and so without doubt will the 4 awaited work of Mancali. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, a great deal of meticulous archival research during the last decade has presented much more new information, particularly on the principal seventeenth century embassies sent by the tsar to China (Petlin, Baikov, Ablin, Spathari, andGolovin). But what has until now been lacking is any means by which the documents, significant and insignificant, of the century can be examined together, in their original state . This means is now capably supplied us by the Soviet scholars N. F. Demidova and V. S. Miasnikov in their book (written in collaboration with S. L. Tikhvinskii and L. I. Duman), RusskoKitaiskie Otnosheniia ? XVII veke (vol. I; Moscow, 1969). This - 22 volume , the first of a pair, contains almost five hundred continuous pages of official documents on Sino -Russian relations between 1609 and 1683 (pp. 39-522). In addition, the editors provide helpful introductions (pp. 1-36), painstaking annotations (pp. 525-565), a glossary of terms, and two indices for proper names and place names. In structuring the volume this way the editors, while recording their own impressions in the first and final pages, have gracefully left the documents to tell their own story. And they do indeed constitute a mine of information, much previously unpublished , on the economic and political relations between Russia and China in the seventeenth century. And unlike Baddeley, which even in its reprint edition costs $85. 00, we can get all this for only three rubles, forty-nine kopecks. No longer will it be necessary for those working on this period to subsist on peanut butter sandwiches . What story do these documents tell? One might begin by asking another question: should the history of Sino-Russian relations in the pre -Nerchinsk years of the seventeenth century, whether written in the Soviet Union, Europe or the United States, continue to be punctuated by the expensive and noisy diplomatic contacts made, for example, by Petlin (1618), Baikov (1656), and Spathari (1676)? In our preoccupation with the major embassies there has - 23 undoubtedly followed the temptation to overlook what was also happening in the intervening decades, from which has emerged the conventional picture of pompous Russian envoys, after months or years of preparation, unable to do business with equally pompous Chinese and Manchu ministers because the elemental problems of how and when diplomatic credentials were to be presented had not been solved. Surely, something more must have been going on. In fact, as this volume demonstrates, the Russian experience was not nearly as frustrating as we are inclined to expect, because business was being done with China. Until Spathari's mission Russia could accept all its diplomatic failures and keep coming back for more because Russian caravans, arriving independently or in the train of Russian envoys, were allowed to conduct a lively and profitable trade in Peking--in the late Ming as well as the early Ch'ing years. These documents reveal how much the desire for expanded trade (to say nothing of gold and silver) figured in Russia 's approach to China in the seventeenth century. And from the reams of attention devoted to the subject of trade in the official instructions to Petlin, Baikov, Ablin, and Spathari (among others), and the many documents dealing with exchangeable commodities, can one doubt that these envoys were being sent as agents of a Russian commercial interest that had been pricked by the now scarcely - 24 noticed caravans of Kirghiz turks, Bukharians, Mongols, and Russians in the off-years of the seventeenth century? The Inner Asian caravan trade had other important functions as well. Russian caravaneers (like Petlin and the Bukharian, Setkul Ablin, who were appointed ambassadors to China because of their expertise accumulated along the trade routes) were a primary...