From Kiachta to Vladivostok: Russian Merchants and the Tea Trade

The time honored Russian tea trade has been unjustly neglected. A 1727 treaty with China made the Russian town of Kiachta, on the border, the first major market for trade; throughout the first half of the nineteenth century Chinese merchants transported tea through Kiachta over great distances, thereby controlling the export. In 1862 Russian merchants first came to Hankou, a famous Chinese tea port. They built factories, produced black tea and tea bricks, and successfully exported them. They built a tea empire by improving production methods, inventing tablet tea, and shortening the tea route by sending it on the Trans-Siberian Railroad—an excellent example of cooperation between merchants and the Russian government—using railroads to consolidate their influence over its colonies. Under Russian management Odessa and Vladivostok surpassed Kiachta in importance as tea transferring ports; and the status of Chinese tea was still strong when its rival, Indian Assam tea, arrived on the scene. In 1915 the First World War lifted the Russian tea business to its historical zenith; but the White Russian merchants’ close association with the tsarist regime ensured its sudden end after the Bolshevik Revolution. The story of Russian tea is nothing less, in fact, than an object lesson in the consequences of failure to globalize.