PART FOUR
Nerchinsk
CHAPTER 8
51°58.7' N 116°35.1' E
On a map, she would not be able to lay her finger on the spot, but nearly every Chinese schoolchild knows of Nerchinsk, or rather she knows of or Nibuchu as it is called in Chinese. It was at this place on the Daurian meadow-steppe in the late summer of 1689 that Eurasia’s two vast, land-based powers met, spun around each other, and parted on terms that laid down their relations for the best part of two centuries. In Nerchinsk, representatives of two highly curious, intelligent rulers, Peter the Great and the Kangxi emperor, mingled to form an astonishingly cosmopolitan event. One thousand came in the Russian entourage, while the Chinese emperor’s Manchu envoys headed a cast ten times that, including regiments of crack troops, Buddhist clergy, and two European Jesuits in the Qing court. In the official Russian tent were Turkish and Persian carpets, an imposing inkstand, and a clock. The Manchu officials dressed in high pomp, in, according to a contemporary account, “all their Robes of State, which were Vests of Gold and Silk Brocade, embroider’d with Dragons of the Empire.”
The Treaty of Nerchinsk delineated the Sino-Russian border, as far as it was possible to do in that vast, vague land. It assigned a fixed place—and loyalty—to the innumerable wandering peoples of the border regions. It marked the end of a way of life, a tragedy in the sense of a remorseless working of things: two powerful states had no time for peripatetic ways of life that stretched back millennia. What mattered to the Manchus was that these lands were the back door to their own revered homeland; Cossack incursions threatened the homeland at a moment when the Manchus were attempting to secure control of the great Chinese empire. And so for China’s new Manchu ruler, the Kangxi emperor, the end to those alarming incursions that the treaty secured was invaluable. Above all, it ensured that Russia would not come to the aid of a people with whom the Manchus were engaged in a bitter struggle on China’s western flank: the Dzungars, a Mongol people, inner Asia’s last nomadic steppe empire. And so the Manchus walked away from the treaty with a deal of satisfaction (years later, after immense military campaigns, the Kangxi emperor was to utterly destroy the Dzungars). The Russians, too, were pleased. For the first time, they won the alluring promise of commerce with the great celestial empire.
It was China’s first ever treaty with a Western power, which is remarkable enough, and even more so for being negotiated on the basis of severe equality. So equal, indeed, that the use of either Russian or Manchu as the language for negotiations would shatter the illusion of parity. And so the treaty was handled in Latin, to the immense benefit of the two Jesuits acting as interpreters, Jean-François Gerbillon and Thomas Pereyra. Jesuits had for some time secured a favorable position at the Qing court by supplying the Kangxi emperor with weapons and teaching him geometry, astronomy, and other Western sciences in which he showed an unquenchable interest. The successful conclusion of the treaty at Nerchinsk earned the Jesuits even greater kudos at court, and an edict of toleration. In Peking, it was a time of unprecedented openness. Meanwhile, those weeks in Nerchinsk represented, with hindsight, a highly unusual set piece of multicultural exchange.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk was not only cosmopolitan but also a remarkable diplomatic success. Later, in the nineteenth century, China’s agreements with England, France, the United States, Germany, and then Japan came to define the nadir of Chinese humiliation: the agreements were “unequal treaties” forced on a prostrate nation by bullying imperialist powers. Much of the narrative of modern China—a return to historical greatness, an obsession among leaders with fuqiang, wealth and power, and an increasingly assertive international posture by China today—has to do with making up for those perceived humiliations. In contrast, even though Russia grabbed an inordinate area of Chinese land at the height of imperialist expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, and even though the Sino-Russian frontier is very different today from what it was at the time of Nerchinsk, the subliminal sense that this first treaty was one negotiated on a basis of equality tempers relations between the two powers to this day—in contrast to China’s ever more troubled relations with others.
As for me, the way to Nerchinsk from Buryat country went via Mogatoi. It was a bleak enough settlement, and locals spoke the name sullenly. Once, a coaling depot gave purpose to the place, unlike now. Once, indeed, it had mattered. From the embankment above Mogatoi, you can follow the chief branch line of the Trans-Siberian Railway as it curves away southeast through still-empty country toward Manzhouli, over the Chinese border, and into Manchuria. From there the line runs on, eventually, to the substantial northern Chinese city of Harbin, built beside the Amur’s biggest tributary, the Songhua River. A good distance again, and the line reaches the Sea of Japan at Vladivostok. This branch line was once known as the Chinese Eastern Railway, though for the first half century of its existence it was foreigners, not the Chinese, who controlled it or fought over it.
When the Russians laid the new track, they started out from Chita. In 1902 an English adventurer was camped about here with a Mongolian camel train. He wrote that the Russians, or rather the Chinese and Korean coolies laboring for them, built the track with such speed that he could see it advancing across the grasslands toward the encampment.
The track was laid clean through the top of China in order more directly to reach the Russian Far East and a terminus in Golden Horn Bay in Vladivostok, a deep and magnificent natural harbor that was key to a new Pacific destiny. A line to Vladivostok already existed, of course: the Trans-Siberian Railway itself. But for 1,500 miles its path runs broadly parallel to the huge northern loop of the Amur River. The new Chinese Eastern Railway was intended as a shortcut, lopping off hundreds of miles from Chita to Vladivostok. Very quickly, the Chinese Eastern Railway became an instrument of imperial policy itself, extending Russian (and later Soviet) influence into China. Harbin, for one, owed its growth and rapid prosperity to the railway. In 1913, when the Chinese Eastern Railway carried out a census, more Russians were found to be living in Harbin than any other nationality, Chinese and Manchu included. When Russia’s civil war raged down the line, Harbin became, along with Paris, Berlin, and Constantinople, a chief refuge for White Russian emigrés. It was, indeed, the biggest European city outside Europe, though when the Chinese government broke diplomatic relations with Imperial Russia, many Russians found themselves stateless. Later, after 1931, when Japanese imperial forces invaded Manchuria, the Chinese Eastern Railway became a key tool for establishing control over their new puppet state of Manchukuo.
One day much later, in August 1954, Nikita Khrushchev stopped off at Mogatoi on his way back from Beijing, where he had gone to see Mao Zedong, China’s Great Helmsman. Mao was in the full flush of power. Only five years before, his peasant forces had won China’s long and bitter civil war, sending Chiang Kai-shek and the defeated Kuomintang fleeing across the East China Sea to Taiwan. On October 1, 1949, Mao had climbed to the top of Beijing’s Tiananmen gate to declare that a prostrate China had at last “stood up,” including to foreign oppressors who for so long had carved up the country. The Soviets did not count themselves among the oppressors, but rather as the older brothers to China’s callow revolutionaries. During those short years, the once-imperial tracks of the Chinese Eastern Railway glowed white-hot with fraternity and socialist promise. Manchuria was to be the proving ground for China’s massive and rapid industrialization, Soviet style. Communist leaders trundled endlessly to and fro between Moscow and Beijing, toasting solidarity.
As for Khrushchev, he probably stayed in Mogatoi only fleetingly, while the train rebunkered with good black Russian coal. But in the local museum, whose faded curtains were permanently drawn, I stopped before an oil painting hanging askew, an old piece of propaganda to mark Khrushchev’s visit. The Soviet leader, his pugilist’s face topped by a panama hat, was surrounded by cheerful toilers of the land, burly young men and Buryat girls in headscarves welcoming him ba
ck to the Motherland. Very shortly after, in the mid-1950s, Sino-Soviet friendship collapsed in bitter acrimony. Mao Zedong resented Khrushchev’s appeasement of the West. And the Russian leader’s demolition of the cult of the late Stalin, to whom Mao Zedong had always given backing, seemed to imply a challenge to the Great Helmsman himself. The rails linking the two countries went cold. Little more than a dozen years later China and Russia were firing artillery at each other from opposing banks of the frozen Amur River and charging at each other in tanks.
In recent years, only one socialist leader still came this way by train: the bouffanted, wedge-shoed late little dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader” who ran his hermit state on the other side of Manchuria like an extended gulag. Kim feared flying, and on his rare visits abroad traveled only on his personal train—and then only across Manchuria to China or Russia. His train was heavily armored, and his trips were the objects of great secrecy. The last time the Dear Leader passed this way via the Chinese Eastern Railway, journalists who noticed the train pull into Moscow station thought they saw the pockmarks of automatic-weapons fire on the carriage sides. Rumors ran around the globe of an assassination attempt. But perhaps another explanation was boredom among some remote bunch of Russian hunters, an aimless vodka-fueled target practice by men with little purpose one endless Siberian night. Out here, such things happen.
• • •
From Mogatoi, I hoped to find a way to Nerchinsk. In the dust-swirled square I had arranged to meet Byambyn. Yes, he said, he knew the track to Nerchinsk; no one else around here would. There was no one else: the square was empty. We set off across bald hills.
We climbed to a low pass that opened up a fresh ocean vista of grasslands. Had we still been in Mongolia, an ovoo would have stood on such a spot, with blue scarves fluttering. But here a monument of decaying concrete declared the entrance to what had been a collective farm nearly as big as the prairie itself, the K-M Kholkoz. On a crumbling plaster frieze, a fist grasped a sheaf of wheat like a thunderbolt. Sheep with ringed curls gamboled around a young shepherdess. Back in Moscow, the Politburo had ordered the virgin lands of the Soviet Union’s wide steppes to be torn up with iron plows, a quarter of a million square miles in all. It was a pet project of Khrushchev’s. That is perhaps why he had stopped on the way back from China to have his portrait painted, the artist surrounding him with admiring toilers.
The front bench seat of the Volga was heavily sprung, more so than the car itself. The Volga’s motion over the ruts and potholes of the ill-used track sent up through the upholstery a sea-slop of contrary oscillations. We rolled, pitched, heaved, and yawed over the billows of the Russian steppe that lay between us and Nerchinsk. The music from the cassette player reinforced the queasiness. Byambyn had just the one cassette, Boney M. He played and replayed it without pause—“Rasputin” and “Daddy Cool” on a closed loop.
Nerchinsk was somewhere over the horizon. In between, the pastures were not yet spent of summer flowers. Though golden grasses had turned to seed, the magentas and blues of sweet vetch, trefoil, and corn cockle blazed in patches. As we went, we moved back in time. No traffic passed us and, coming out of Buryatia, we entered a land empty except, every hour or two, for small groups of ethnic Russians, old men with scythes and scarved women with long forks pitching meadow hay; others were picknicking on bright rugs beside new-made ricks.
Toward the end of the day, the land altered. We crested a broad ridge, and on the far side of it were forested slopes and the broad valley of the Ingoda River, which I had last seen at Chita. We ran through our first town, Kazanovo, a former Soviet mining settlement above the river, trapped among tailings and slag heaps. Below the town, the Ingoda had grown strong and bold compared with the infant stream I had known at Chita; soon, a little farther down and out of sight, it had an assignment with the Onon coming from Mongolia; at their junction the names of both rivers would vanish as the Shilka River began, then, 350 further miles downstream, where the Shilka’s waters mixed with the Argun River, there the Amur proper began.
On the far side of the Ingoda was the Trans-Siberian Railway again, which I had not seen since Chita either. An oil train, a black slick dozens of tankers long, crawled below the bluff, five thousand miles out from Moscow and still another three days’ journey to Vladivostok. We waited, and then crossed the empty track, leaving it as it slanted through poplars to pass below our destination. As the sun cast the car’s long shadow before us, a final scend of the steppe pitched us into Nerchinsk.
Nerchinsk. When the place was a mere stockade manned by rough Cossacks, the future of the world’s two biggest empires had pirouetted around this place in ways unimaginable since. For several days in late August 1689, in an encampment down by the river, emissaries from Peter the Great, surrounded by the “clash and clamor” of ten thousand Manchu warriors, had negotiated with the envoys of Kangxi, the Manchu emperor of China. The treaty that resulted was to keep the Russians at bay from territory that had long been under Manchu sway. The Russians would keep Nerchinsk. But they would cede territory east of that, including the entire Amur basin. In other words, not just Manchuria, the lands south of the great Amur loop, were acknowledged as Chinese, but an enormous chunk of the northern Amur watershed, a region which Europeans came to call Outer Tartary or, sometimes, Outer Manchuria. Under the treaty, the czar undertook to pull out all the Cossack adventurers who had pressed into these lands. In return, and what really counted for him, Russia won the valuable right to trade furs with China, eventually through Kyakhta. As for the Kangxi emperor, the treaty secured his northern border. He was now able to lay the foundations of a Chinese empire unmatched in reach before, or since. At the time, Russia felt it had secured exceptional terms. After all, the Cossack frontiersmen who had opened up the Amur lands were at the very limits of their abilities to secure and defend this wild territory. Only much later did Russians look for grievances to nurture, and reasons to have the lands back.
After the Manchus struck camp at Nerchinsk and marched out, the town would have sunk back into irrelevance, had not Greek mining engineers sent out by Peter the Great persuaded the czar that Nerchinsk’s environs were crammed with gold and silver. Nerchinsk became the heart of a huge penal operation. The state mines founded on Nerchinsk were key to Peter’s imperial expansion. The czar intended that they should bankroll Russia’s Europeanization, no less. And so, by the end of Peter’s long rule, silver had overtaken furs as Siberia’s chief importance to the state. When the Decembrists were put to work in the penal mines a century later, Nerchinsk’s seams were still rich in silver.
By the 1870s, private mining capital had replaced the state’s, though still with the help of katorga, convict labor. Anarchists and hardened revolutionaries had by now succeeded the Decembrists as the chief class of political prisoner, though in the mines they were outnumbered by ordinary, unlettered convicts. Travelers found it possible in those days to put this dark side of Nerchinsk’s prosperity to one side and be impressed by the unexpected opulence, the showy gilding of civilization: the domes of the churches in the sunlight, the solid air of the public buildings, the merchants’ houses, and in them orchestrions and Veuve Clicquot.
But I was now finding it hard to square all this significance with the haphazard, windblown squalor before us. Even Byambyn, a life spent in gap-toothed Siberian towns, let out a hiss of derision at the sight of Nerchinsk. The church on the edge of town was roofless; dacha-size cylinders, industrial boilers from an earlier era, lay heaped in front of it. In the road a drunk tilted, his feet splayed, into a private gale of misfortune.
A stout woman, her blond beehive tethered by a scarf knotted under her chin, was rocking toward us with carrot tops spilling out of plastic bags. We stopped by her. Had we come for treasure, she asked, flashing a mouthful of gold. We were not sure what we had come for, but we hoped for a hotel. The woman said she was going that way anyway, and would show us. She climbed in.
Up the road was a small store. The next day much of the town’s population appeared to be massed inside it. Gusts of mothers and children were bringing sausages, sweets, and cigarettes up to the counter, the cashier wedged behind a wrought-iron grill. I asked her where the Nerchinsk prison was. She nodded at her customers. They would show me, she said: the bus was coming soon. In an instant, her flock of customers had fluttered outside. I climbed with them into the bus. We bumped our way across to the far side of town, more desolate still, and we all got out at the prison’s steel gates. The gates opened, and women and children weighed down with provisions all shuffled in. Tuesday morning was visiting day.
Alone again, I followed the prison’s wooden palisade, turning right at the watchtower until I came to the river, the Nercha, flowing on the jail’s far side to where it joined the Shilka a mile or two down. Near the bank, a huge sign with peeling paint listed what townsfolk were forbidden from doing, on pain of several punishments. They were not to photograph the prison. They were not to distract the guards or, you have been warned, communicate with prisoners. There was to be no loitering. There appeared to be no one around to enforce the rules. The prison itself seemed sunk in apathy and neglect.
Black Dragon River Page 17