The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia
Page 4
In 1858 the Chinese were being threatened by an Anglo-French alliance; they dared not antagonize Russia as well. At Aigun they ceded the left bank of the Amur as far as the Ussuri, and from there both banks to the sea. The territory between the Ussuri and the sea was to be a condominium. Muravyov quickly established a town, Blagoveshchensk—‘Good Tidings’—on the middle Amur and built up the Cossack population of the new province to 20,000. Political and criminal exiles, retired sailors and, finally, the efficient German Mennonite farmers from the Volga were all induced or forced to settle there.
But by June 1859 the Chinese had checked the Anglo-French menace. They felt strong enough to repudiate the ‘unequal’ treaty of Aigun; China and Russia threatened each other with war. The advances of the Taiping rebels and a renewed attack by the English and the French on Peking and Shanghai turned the tables once more. In November 1860 Russia forced the disarrayed Chinese to sign a treaty which surrendered the Amur, the right bank of the Ussuri, half of Lake Hanka (Hingku), the enormous territory between the Ussuri and the sea, and the Chinese half of the island of Sakhalin. Russia had now cut Manchuria off from the sea, she had a land border with Korea and, on the island of Sakhalin, with Japan. She had relatively ice-free Pacific harbours, as well as 1,000 miles of navigable river from the sea to the edge of Transbaykalia. Before the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway at the turn of the century, the Amur was the main link between the Russian Far East and the rest of the Empire; even today no proper road connects the two except through China. Russia’s Amur possessions virtually encircled Manchuria, giving her a stranglehold on northern China that she could not resist tightening. The Amur was to give eastern Siberia grain and meat, as well as adding to Siberia’s wealth of fur and minerals. Muravyov quickly brought in shipping, telegraph lines and colonists, before resigning, when St Petersburg would not give him still looser a rein, and leaving his empire to a lesser breed of officials whose inadequacies were to embitter Przhevalsky.
*
As Przhevalsky’s expedition followed the Amur south-east, the river broadened to a quarter of a mile wide and, breaking through the mountains that divide Mongolia from Manchuria, Przhevalsky found himself in the odd luxuriance of vegetation that marks the Ussuri region off from both the Siberian taiga and the Manchurian steppes. Cossack posts alternated with the birch-bark huts (yurts) of the Orochon (or Udeghe) fishermen. Paeonies and lilies grew in the meadows. At Blagoveshchensk Przhevalsky was lucky to catch another steamer going the whole length of the Amur. By the beginning of July he was in the village of Khabarovka where the Amur becomes wholly Russian, at the confluence of the Ussuri.
Few European explorers had preceded Przhevalsky on the Ussuri. The first had been three Jesuit fathers, Régis, Jartoux and Fridel in 1709, who were mapping the Chinese empire for the Emperor K’ang Hsi. Their maps were available to the Russians through various sources, chiefly the works of Father Iakinf (Bichurin), the greatest scholar of the Russian Clerical Mission in Peking in the first half of the nineteenth century. But one-and-a-half centuries elapsed before Muravyov’s expeditions sent Russian explorers up the Ussuri: the most notable being Maksimovich, of St Petersburg’s Botanical Gardens, who was to analyse and describe nearly all Przhevalsky’s botanical collections.
In Khabarovka Przhevalsky bought a rowing boat, hiring Cossack rowers for each stage from station to station as he went up-river. June frosts had given way to the continuous rains of July. At first he passed through flat country, with scattered swamps and lakes among the rich grasslands, where Siberian iris and white paeonies bloomed. Then, on the right (east) bank, mountains covered with forest loomed closer. The forests were an improbable mixture of almost sub-arctic and almost sub-tropical species. Northern aspens and birch grew with wild apricots and palm-like aralias; cork trees (phellodendron) and Manchurian walnuts flourished among the alders. Vines and climbers like schizandra and the fruiting actinidia wove over willows and pines in an improbable confusion of Himalayan and Siberian flora. Sheltered by the coastal mountains from the cold currents of the Sea of Japan, catching the most northerly of the monsoons, the southern species not only endured the long thirty-degree frosts of winter, but flourished in an almost impenetrable jungle. And Przhevalsky’s excursions into the jungle revealed an animal life just as bizarre: the hunter might stumble on a bear or a tiger, a crane or an ibis, in a world that no more conformed with the norms of geography and zoology than a landscape by Douanier Rousseau.
But the summer rains that made the Ussuri forests so rich and rank were a great drawback for settlers and explorers. The river had risen twelve feet above its normal height, the banks were often flooded for miles, and excursions into the hinterland were almost impossible. Przhevalsky’s dream of camping out in the wilderness was often thwarted by the wet and the myriads of gnats and mosquitoes. Even to relieve oneself without first lighting a smoky fire was to invite hours of torture from insect bites.
For most of the twenty-three nights that Przhevalsky spent on the Ussuri bank as he made his way to the last Cossack outpost of Busse, 300 miles upstream from Khabarovka, he was driven to seek shelter in the Cossack stations. There were twenty-seven of these, spaced about ten miles apart, not only to guard the Russian right bank from the Chinese left bank—which was in any case uninhabited—but as focal points for colonization and agriculture. The Cossack stations contrasted miserably with the untouched wilderness. Between 1858 and 1862 some 5,000 Cossacks had been chosen by lot to be removed from their homesteads in Transbaykalia, where they had cattle and corn in plenty, and to be made pioneers. Their cattle were lost on the journey, and the rains that made their corn sprout in May now rotted the grain before it could be harvested. The settlements subsisted on government handouts that often failed to arrive. Cossack families starved; imported food and cloth cost up to eight times as much as in Moscow and were often so rotten as to be unusable. Przhevalsky, half-Cossack himself, was upset and indignant at the state to which the Ussuri Cossacks had been reduced in ten years. They could not be bothered with fishing or trapping, they sang no songs, their spirit was gone, and vodka was their only consolation.
Although a report on the state of the Cossack settlers was part of his duties, Przhevalsky was to incur much official displeasure with his findings of ‘filth, hunger and paupery’. Part of the trouble was the remoteness of the Ussuri from the centre of administration, which lay in Nikolayevsk, 600 miles to the north-east. True, Muravyov’s last act had been to set up a telegraph line which ran from Nikolayevsk to the Ussuri, the Pacific and, eventually, to China. But no proper path had been cleared through the Ussuri forest and it needed only heavy rain or a fallen tree to cut the line. Thus, in 1868, when Chinese bandits overran much of the Ussuri, pillaging and burning the Cossack stations, it took seventeen days before the authorities in Nikolayevsk heard the news.
Despite the rains which made it hard to dry plants or to preserve bird skins, Przhevalsky’s collections were already growing heavy. Unlike his later expeditions, the Ussuri journey produced no species of plant or animal totally unknown to science; but it brought to light a number of species hitherto only known much farther south. The waterlilies (Nymphaea) of the lower Ussuri gave way, farther upstream, to the first clumps of the giant Nelumbium (a spectacular and enormous relative of the lotus and tropical waterlilies) that fill the shallow parts of Lake Hanka. On fine days, Przhevalsky and Yagunov (the third man, Nikolayev, had abandoned the expedition) strolled along the banks, and while the oarsmen struggled against the current, they watched and listened to, and sometimes shot, the grey herons and snipe on the sands, the blue magpies on the islands and the Chinese orioles in the forests. As the sun rose, the butterflies emerged, among them the splendid Papylio, the size of a man’s hand, that Maack had discovered. But with the butterflies came the gnats, in opaque clouds. The naturalist could work only in the early morning and the evening; the hot, dank days were a test of the traveller’s endurance.
Przhevalsky soon reached Lake
Hanka, surrounded by impenetrable marsh on three sides and, on the west, by hilly steppes and the Manchurian frontier. Shallow, windy and hardly picturesque, Lake Hanka was, however, one of the most important places visited by Przhevalsky. It was a haven for migratory birds and the home of hundreds of species which bred almost undisturbed by the handful of Russian fishermen and the occasional Tungus tribesman who lived off the wealth of salmon, carp, burbot and sturgeon in the lake.
The Russians who fished Lake Hanka and farmed around their three villages on the western shore were rather more successful than the Cossacks. They were peasants from southern Russia who were used to tilling the soil. The authorities had brought the first consignment to Lake Hanka in 1860, a year before the emancipation of the serfs made such summary measures impossible. But the new settlements were working well; cattle, even sheep, grazed the lake-shore, and melons from the Volga grew in their sheltered kitchen gardens despite the depredations of the Siberian chipmunks.
But there were no more than 500 peasants and a score of infantry soldiers living off a lake bigger than Hampshire. The fishing was primitive and wasteful; neither the Russians on the west shore of Lake Hanka nor the single Chinaman and the retired soldier who fished the north-east outlet into the Sungacha knew how to preserve their catch. Daurian sturgeons weighing half a ton were not unknown; a hundredweight of caviare would be extracted, only to be thrown away. The Chinaman would take just the sturgeon’s cartilage and set off on foot to sell this delicacy in the Manchurian town of I-lan, 150 miles away.
Przhevalsky spent all August 1867 roaming the shores of Lake Hanka. He worked hard, sleeping only five hours each night. It was a rough life. He wrote to Fateyev in Warsaw from Lake Hanka, ‘I’ve a two-inch beard, my clothes wouldn’t be fit for a beggar in Europe.’ He collected another 130 species of flowering plants and spent many hours in hides, watching the birds of the marshes, until he could hold out no longer and fired, sending the wild duck and sea-eagles into panic and the turtles scuttling back into the water. But he was too late to observe the spring migration and too early for the autumn migration; in September he left the lake and made for the Pacific coast, about 100 miles south.
A rough carriage road already linked Lake Hanka with the River Suifung, and thus with the sea, over a land depopulated by battles for empires. In the emptiness Przhevalsky came across a great brick fortress with a granite turtle on a marble plinth—a silent relict of the Manchu Nü-chen empire of the twelfth century. Then, reaching the Suifung, Przhevalsky and Yagunov transferred to a rowing boat and, having negotiated the rocky gorge of the Bear’s Cheeks, came safely through to the sea and to the settlement now called Posyet (Novgorodskaya).
Przhevalsky had seen something of the life of the Cossacks and of the peasant settlers from Russia on and around the Ussuri. After leaving Lake Hanka he established contact with the Nanai and Udeghe, two of the Tungus peoples who were, virtually, the aborigines of the area. The Nanai (or Goldi) hunters, fishers and gatherers, who grew tobacco and a few vegetables, impressed him with their gentle and affectionate family life. But lack of a common language made Przhevalsky a disappointing ethnologist; he could only conclude how little the Udeghe’s life and reactions differed from those of their dogs.
It was the Ussuri, unfortunately, that gave Przhevalsky his first impressions of the Chinese. The Chinese exiles and outcasts who searched the Ussuri for gold and ginseng, or came to harvest edible seaweed from the coastal rocks, were hardly representative of their nation. Przhevalsky might as well have judged the English by the miners of the Yukon. But, although he admired their industry in tilling the fields and growing every conceivable crop from barley to ginseng, he was horrified by the rough brutality of this all-male society. The Chinese were exiles twice over: banished by the Chinese government and now aliens to the new Russian government. But Przhevalsky took their hostility to be typical of the Chinese, rather than a natural evasive reaction to the appearance of a Russian lieutenant. He condemned them for their exploitation of the countryside: they harvested the seaweed, and chopped down oak forests to grow funguses on the stumps; they refused to deal in Russian paper currency and drained the revenue by exporting silver to China. The Chinese of the Ussuri made an unfortunate first impression on Przhevalsky of self-sufficiency, xenophobia and ruthlessness.
In the last three years a second alien element had crossed over into the Ussuri. Koreans left their overpopulated and infertile countryside to walk over the frozen River Tumanga. They risked being caught and shot by the Korean authorities, but by 1867 there were 1,800 Korean peasants farming within fifty miles of Posyet. Przhevalsky liked the Koreans; they were as industrious as the Chinese, but were eager to be integrated with the Russians. Many were Christians and, as was the custom for non-Russian converts in the Tsarist empire, they took Russian names from the Russian officers who acted as their godparents. Przhevalsky struck up an acquaintance with a Korean who had adopted the name Pyotr Semyonov; he liked him for his cleanliness as well as godliness, and was intrigued by Semyonov’s descriptions of Korean life.
So intrigued was Przhevalsky that, armed with carbine and revolver, he went to the frontier river, took a boat and three soldiers from the post and rowed across to the fortress town of Keiko (then Kegeng-P’u). It was a daring act, for the Korean government considered its border with Russia closed. To trade with Russians, even to communicate with them, was punishable by beheading. As Przhevalsky’s boat approached the other shore of the Tumanga, Korean police and soldiers rushed down to urge him to leave. They argued that the commandant was sick, that even to give him a message from Przhevalsky would cost them their lives. But Przhevalsky had already taken the stance which he invariably was to adopt in such situations. As he recounts, ‘Knowing the character of all Asiatics, in dealing with whom one must be insistent and even insolent to get one’s way, I began to demand …’ A crowd began to gather; the police turned to beat them back and Przhevalsky’s party landed in the confusion. Besieged by a curious crowd, undeterred by the soldiers, Przhevalsky forced his way to the house that the Koreans had set aside for Chinese officials. He waved his Siberian warrant for post-horses as if it were a passport.
The commandant of Keiko, Yun-Hab, eventually appeared, borne on a litter in solemn procession. Przhevalsky and the commandant sat down on a tiger skin and, although Przhevalsky refused to smoke a pipe of tobacco that the Koreans offered him, an amicable and halting discussion followed through an interpreter. Przhevalsky asked if there had been any frontier violations, as a pretext for his visit, and then tried to ask how many people lived in Keiko, how far it was to Seoul, the capital, how many troops Korea had. To each question Yun-Hab answered, ‘A lot.’ Then Yun-Hab requested Przhevalsky to have all Korean settlers in Russia sent back across the border to be beheaded. Neither side meeting with any satisfaction, they turned to lighter things. Przhevalsky’s men wrestled with Korean soldiers and then performed a Russian dance for Yun-Hab’s amusement. Przhevalsky rose to leave, but before getting into his boat, he put on a show of his own that he was to repeat on all his future expeditions. He had a board erected at 100 paces, aimed his carbine at it, and heard the crowd of Koreans cry out in astonishment as the bullet smashed the board and ricocheted over the fields around Keiko.
Przhevalsky had by now fulfilled his mission; but instead of returning directly to the Ussuri, he decided to walk 300 miles along the coast following difficult and sometimes undetectable forest trails, and then to cross the coastal range, the Sikhote Alin, down to the Ussuri basin. The first snow was falling and the rivers were soon to freeze when, in late October 1867, Przhevalsky sent a soldier across the border to the Manchurian town of Hun-ch’un to buy six pack-horses, scoured the Russian settlements for harness, rope and supplies, and prepared his party for an unprecedented trek through fog, gales, fire, marsh, ice and snow. He took on two soldiers to drive the horses, carry game and make tea. Two hundredweight of specimens had been sent off to Sretensk in Transbaykalia, but the pack-horses we
re heavily laden. The loads included, besides, plants and skins, barley for the horses, groats and dry biscuits for the soldiers, while one horse carried nothing but gunpowder, shot, lead and hunting guns.
Przhevalsky usually walked well ahead of Yagunov, the soldiers and the pack-horses. He would shoot goats and pheasants, leaving the main party to pick up the carcases. Often he would abandon the trail (marking the route for the others with scraps of paper) to make excursions into the coastal mountains in pursuit of game, arriving at the night’s bivouac late, tired and laden with carcases. The party was so well supplied with meat that they had to leave goat and deer for the crows and the Ussuri tigers, while they fed on soup made of pheasant’s innards. Przhevalsky’s energy was phenomenal. Yagunov would suggest camping at a suitable spot, such as a forest clearing beside fresh water, only to be forced to carry on into the evening by a relentless leader. Pressing on, they managed about ten miles a day through tall grass and dense forests, having only a compass to help them decide which trails to follow. By now Przhevalsky had acquired enough Chinese to ask the way of the occasional Chinaman they met, but not enough to understand the answer. Walking well ahead of his companions, armed with rifle, revolver and dagger, accompanied by his pointer, he must have been intimidating to the Chinese settler in his isolated wattle house.
The days were clear and often relatively warm; the path from Posyet to Vladivostok had been cleared in places, with bridges across many of the streams. In ten days Przhevalsky’s party had reached Vladivostok. They arrived only just in time, for that night a blizzard began, a reminder that, though rhododendrons might flower in autumn so far south, this was still an extension of Siberia. Przhevalsky stayed ten days in Vladivostok to rest the horses—he was a novice at loading pack-horses and the animals had injured their spines carrying badly balanced loads over rough paths.