By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
While a lot has been
written about the British and Dutch missions in Qing
China, during Russian Imperial times, it was the 1727 Treaty of Kyakhta which gave Russia privileges no other European
country enjoyed until the Opium Wars, which was the result of a conscious Qing
attempt to forestall a Russo-Junghar alliance. It
worked admirably well. Conciliated by trade, for several decades Russia made no
further significant effort to interfere in Inner Asian politics.1
The first diplomatic
crisis in Russo-Qing relations began after the Qing conquest of the Dzungar Khanate in 1755-57. The Dzungar–Qing
Wars were a decades-long series of conflicts that pitted the Dzungar Khanate against the Qing dynasty of China and their
Mongolian vassals. Fighting took place over a wide swath of Inner Asia, from
present-day central and eastern Mongolia to Tibet, Qinghai, and Xinjiang
regions of present-day China. Qing victories ultimately led to the
incorporation of Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang into the Qing Empire.
Between the
mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, China and its borderlands
figured prominently in the dreamworld of Western geopolitics. Access to its
trade held the key to untold commercial riches. The seeming success of Catholic
missionaries at the imperial court made the augmentation of Christ’s flock by
hundreds of millions of Chinese converts appear to be an imminent prospect.2
For Russians, military dominance over the Qing held the promise of wealth and
security for Siberia, in the near term, and eventually hegemony in Eurasia and
in the Pacific. The Amur valley, a territory which Muscovy formally ceded to
the Qing in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk after
military reverses, was regarded by influential Russians as a lost Eldorado
whose supposed agricultural productivity and easy access to the ocean could
have given economic meaning to all of the empire’s eastern conquests, from
Irkutsk to Alaska.3
In 1754, the
prominent official Fedor Soimonov,
soon to be governor of Siberia, arrived in Nerchinsk
to prepare ships and personnel for a voyage down the Amur River and into the
North Pacific. This was envisioned as a Third Kamchatka Expedition, following
in the footsteps of Vitus Bering’s earlier explorations. Russian officials had
come to regard the Amur as crucial to their plans for the exploration and
exploitation of fur-bearing territories in northeastern Siberia, the Pacific
islands, and eventually Alaska. Without it, goods and supplies needed to be
moved to the oceanic port of Okhotsk through the Stanovoi
and Iablonovoi Mountains, a dangerous and ruinously
expensive portage that precluded the building of large vessels. Anything that
could not be carried by a donkey or packhorse was out of the question; anchors,
for instance, had first to be divided into five parts.18 In 1756, Vasilii Bratishchev was sent to
Beijing to negotiate with the Qing court for permission to sail down the
river; at the same time, the letter from the College of Foreign Affairs he
carried contained the pointed insinuation that the expedition was not to be
abandoned in the event of Qing reluctance. According to a secret intelligence
report Irkutsk governor-general Ivan Iakobii received
from the Catholic missionary Sigismondo di San Nicola
in Beijing, Qianlong had read the diplomatic letter Bratishchev
brought and exclaimed, “Cunning Russia asks respectfully [to navigate the Amur]
but announces that it has already prepared ships for the voyage, by which they
imply that they will sail with or without permission.” Permission was denied,
in part, San Nicola reported, because of a desire to protect the pearl fishery
in the Manchus’ ancestral domains.4
Anticipating a
rejection, the prominent official Fedor Soimonov had been ready to sail down the Amur in
force, but the College of Foreign Affairs found his proposal foolhardy and
rejected it. Plans for the expedition were put on hold indefinitely. Soon,
however, the tone of diplomatic exchanges became more hostile in the wake of
Qing allegations that Russia was violating the Treaty of Kiakhta.
The new empress Catherine II began to revisit the prospect of a military
solution, which had first been proposed by Iakobii in
the 1750s.
The diplomatic and
military escalation and impasse thus came to constitute a kind of Cold War,
albeit one with lower stakes. Intelligence and other forms of covert action
substituted for military engagement and direct negotiation.
Intelligence and knowledge
Here it was that
intelligence and other forms of covert action substituted for military engagement
and direct negotiation. The Russo-Qing Cold War played out principally in two
theaters: the mountains and steppes around the former Junghar
Khanate, where the borders of modern Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and China
meet, and the border regions east of Lake Baikal, including northern Mongolia
and Manchuria. They were never isolated from each other. Russian officials
stationed in each theater routinely shared information and strategic
deliberations, with Iakobii in his nominally
insignificant town of Selenginsk serving as the key
node for the collection and dissemination of intelligence along the entire
Russo-Qing frontier; on the other hand, Qing armies and command staff sent to
Xinjiang frequently included Khalkha Mongols or members of Solon, Daur, and other Manchurian tribes.5
And although it was
intended as a kind of the moral equivalent of war, advancing imperial goals in
the absence of credible military or diplomatic force, by the end of fifteen
years of increasingly intensive penetration of Qing Mongolia Russia was no
closer to achieving these goals than it had been at the outset. In the
meantime, the forces that had once so threatened Qing rule in Mongolia now
foreclosed the possibility of a Russian takeover. As the fourth emperor of
the Qing, Ch’ien-lung, put it, rejecting the prospect of an invasion
of Russia: “If the Russians wished to cause trouble they would have done so
long ago when Chingünjav and the Khalkhas
were in confusion and wavering … Since they did not move in the past, they
certainly will not cause trouble now.”6 It would be nearly a century before
Russian ships sailed down the Amur, which would require a brazen annexation
during the Second Opium War, and Mongolia would remain firmly in Qing hands
until the twentieth century. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable information
Russia received from its spies was the constant reassurance that the Qing were
not plotting an offensive and that it was, therefore, free to concentrate its
attention on military events in Europe and on its southern frontier.
In 1763, the Siberian
historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller prepared a memorandum considering the
justifications for war: the “insults and contempt” shown by the Lifanyuan, he argued, provided ample grounds to renew pre-Nerchinsk Russian claims on the Amur and Mongolia. Müller
argued that the conquest of the frontier would be easier than it seemed at
first glance: vastly outnumbered by resentful Han Chinese subjects and facing
discontent from Mongols who would abandon it for Russia at the first opportunity,
the Qing Dynasty would, if not collapse like a house of cards, at least be
easily pushed into an advantageous peace.
Qianlong, for his
part, had also considered war: he still maintained some claims over the region
east of Lake Baikal and its Buriat and Evenki
population (relatives of the Manchus and Mongols), and a Mongol spy reported to
Iakobii in 1760 that a military council on the
subject had taken place. According to the agent, the Qing generals were wary of
the climactic difficulties of Siberian warfare and the uncertainties
surrounding the Russian response.23 Qianlong himself was reluctant to attack
unless the war could be won at a single blow. Thus neither party took any
meaningful steps towards shattering the peace between the two empires, and
Russia never committed to the required buildup of troops. In 1764, at the
height of the tension, Russian military reforms increased the border’s
theoretical complement of troops by a factor of two, but this was phrased in
purely defensive terms and would, in any case, fall far short of the numbers
needed for an invasion.
The diplomatic and
military escalation and impasse thus came to constitute a kind of Cold War,
albeit one with lower stakes. Intelligence and other forms of covert action
substituted for military engagement and direct negotiation. As in the twentieth
century, when neither side wanted to risk open rupture, the struggle for the
loyalties of third parties became increasingly crucial. This role was played by
the Eurasian peoples caught between the two empires. In the mid-1750s, the
Khalkha leaders of Qing Mongolia were corresponding with Iakobii
about defection, the Kazakh Middle Horde and the Uriangkhai
of the Altai Mountains were swearing fealty to both sides, and Junghar fugitives were demanding asylum in Russia in the
tens of thousands. By the end of the period in 1771, most of the Volga Torghuts (Kalmyks), Western Mongols like the Oirats who dominated the Junghar
Khanate, some of whom had been Russian subjects since the 1630s and others who had
recently fled the Qing conquest, defected across the border in a dramatic
migration famously chronicled by Thomas De Quincey.7
The Macartney embassy
The creasing belief
that Britain was Russia’s main enemy in the Pacific appears to be misleading,
in fact over the next few decades, it would be the Americans, not the British,
who would take the leading role in the emerging maritime fur trade between
Canton and northwestern North America.8
This is when high
officials of the French empire and others, started to rely on intelligence
about the Russo-Qing relationship as they thought the Russians were about to
invade the Qing realm and overthrow the dynasty.
Following Russia's
1792 expedition to Japan (when they received trade concessions from the
Tokugawa shogunate) at the time when it also had made leeway in China, the
Russians now looked with concern on the British embassy
in the Chinese capital headed by (the former British ambassador in St.
Petersburg) George Macartney who had been deputed by the government in London
to request ‘fair and equitable’ trading rights from the Qianlong Emperor.
Thus the fear of the
British threat, by the end of 1791 led Russia to developed a secret,
conspiratorial plan to derail the Macartney embassy by poisoning the well in
Beijing and describe the potential options as follows:
1. To send to
Beijing, under the pretext of border disputes, a smart, humble, and resourceful
man; to send with him some scholars, to disabuse the Chinese of the idea that we
are all Kropotovs, who unfortunately gave them a very
poor sense of our degree of enlightenment. Beyond this, a few Jesuits, in their
ordinary civil capacity, who by means of their brethren located in Beijing, may
be quite useful. Through them, he must secretly persuade the Chinese Government
of the danger to which it will be subject if it once allows the English into
their ports, by depicting their behavior in India, the destruction of the most
beautiful domains of the Great Mogul, and that they have equal aims in mind for
China, and so on. The 2nd means consisted in this, that before dispatching the
minister, two Jesuits should be sent with news of this enterprise, who can
meanwhile preemptively discover who in the Chinese ministry supports the
English, and can underhandedly give them to know of the hostile plans of the
English against their state as a matter known full well in Europe.9
This was followed by
the 1805 Golovkin embassy, Alexander I’s attempt to one-up Macartney by
extracting commercial concessions like those the British
envoy had failed to obtain during his 1793 embassy.
Several members of
the embassy had associated intelligence-gathering functions,
including the academics, but it seems clear that the unofficial head of
intelligence was 27-year-old Count Iakov Lambert, son
of the French émigré Henri-Joseph de Lambert and the embassy’s second
secretary. In preparation for departure, Lambert collected all the existing
documents he could find in the central archives having to do with RussoQing relations. In addition to Lambert, the embassy
also employed the best Qing experts in the empire. Like Macartney, Golovkin
took his intellectual preparation seriously; unlike him, he would not be caught
unawares by Inner Asian politics.
In the wake of the
Golovkin debacle, Russia tried to use the next rotating shift of the Russian
Ecclesiastical Mission to gather intelligence, particularly about French and
British attempts to deal with the Qing, and make contact with the former Beijing
Jesuits. In 1807, the mission’s escorting agent Semën
Pervushin was issued a set of instructions which gave
him detailed guidance for conversations with the missionaries. Beyond being
merely cautious of possible British influence and bribery, in conversations
with ex-Jesuits, the agent would “observing exterior calm, subtly extract
needed information, and not immediately or suddenly so that they may not guess
at what you need.” He was provided with a few sample conversational scenarios
as illustration.113 Though it is likely the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not
know this, a register of all the Beijing ex-Jesuits would be brief indeed: by
this point only Frs. Poirot, de Grammont, and Panzi remained among the living and were unlikely to be of
much use or influence.
The Golovkin embassy
however had longer-term consequences. In 1816, Macartney/William Amherst’s
embassy failed in part because Qing officials imitated Yundondorji’s
precedent in demanding that he kowtow not just in Beijing, but in advance of
his audience. Both sides explicitly invoked Golovkin in the process.10
The geopolitical
environment of the region however was shaped not by the scientific achievements
of the explorers who traversed it, but by the mistaken assumptions, failures of
knowledge, and outright deceptions on the basis of which European powers took
action. It was an environment riddled with paradoxes. An age of intelligence
failure became an age of conspiratorial obsession; Britain, so long represented
as the spearpoint of European imperialism in China, depending on intelligence
about Russia; Russia, despite its long history of intelligence, gathering in
the Qing Empire, was just as susceptible to strategic ignorance as Britain and
France. These paradoxes should reshape our understanding of the period. If an
outsize personality like the Hungarian adventurer Maurice
Benyovszky was able to keep the entire
foreign-policy apparatus of France spellbound by false information, it was not
because the events he revealed were marginal or unimportant, but because European
ignorance was so profound.
The Russian
intelligence structure never succeeded in creating a self-enclosed world of
discourse, in which the terms, as well as the objects of study, were determined
by the needs and categories of power. Indeed, the reason it was developed so
assiduously was that Russians could not but confront the strength and regional
influence of their competitor. Moreover, it was too frequently disturbed by the
human lives of the people on which it relied. Mongols made for convenient informants,
except when they knew how valuable they were and tried to make the most of
their position; missionaries might have been well-placed sources, but the
violent, liquor-soaked world they made for themselves turned them from a
solution into a problem. It was only when the Russian state managed to sever
nearly all the links connecting it informationally with the Qing that it began
to indulge fantasies of global power centered on the North Pacific, listening
far more closely to projectors in St. Petersburg than to its own officers in
Eastern Siberia (who were themselves not above idle scheming). Russia’s
competitors, for their part, were seduced by the promises of privileged
intelligence access contained in putatively secret documents and published
sources and pursued policies that were doomed to failure as a result.
Conclusion
In the middle of
the seventeenth century, statesmen and scholars all over Europe looked at China
as a beacon of commercial, intellectual, and cultural potential, offering the
promise of wealth as well as global civilizational convergence. Russia’s
earliest ventures eastward became interesting to a variety of audiences as an
indication that this convergence was to be realized together with Europe’s
commercial ambitions. Just as merchants in London and Amsterdam made thousands
from the trans-Muscovite rhubarb trade, so too did agents and diplomats exploit
Muscovy’s emerging potential as a source of sinological
knowledge. Well into the eighteenth century, Western Europeans avidly sought out
rumors and documents about the war they thought was coming between Catherine
and Qianlong or the embassy they thought had established a lasting alliance
between Peter and Kangxi. By the nineteenth century, this was no longer the
case. British and American commercial vessels began to prove definitively that
Russia’s China trade was of regional rather than global significance, and the
work of its agents and missionaries became objects of academic and not
political curiosity (in contrast to Central Asia, where Russian advances gave
the initial impetus to British fantasies about the “Great Game”).
But no significant
group of Qing subjects, whether Mongol, Turkic, or Manchurian, chose to defect
to Russia, and no unexpected conflict gave Russian border officials the pretext
to execute their ambitious strategic plans. Instead, the future of Russo-Qing
relations would depend on the problems faced in the mid-nineteenth century by
the Qing empire itself, borne out of both internal and foreign conflict. The
Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion provided the Russian Empire with the
opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength; in the case of the Second
Opium War, Russian gains, territorially the greatest of any imperialist power,
were directly based on exploiting the Qing government’s desperation. As a
strategy for gaining power, knowledge had become a dead end.
1. On this see also
Gregory Afinogenov. Spies and Scholars: Chinese
Secrets and Imperial
Russia's Quest for
World Power. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 2020.
2. The most
thorough account of the former is Louis Dermigny, La
Chine et l’Occident: le commerce à Canton au XVIIIe siècle, 1719-1833 (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1964); the
classic statement on the latter, Arnold Rowbotham,
Missionary and Mandarin : The Jesuits at the Court of China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1942).
3. See Mark Bassin, “Expansion and Colonialism on the Eastern Frontier:
Views of Siberia and the Far East in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Journal of Historical
Geography 14, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–21, doi:10.1016/S0305-7488(88)80124-5;
and for the nineteenth century, Mark Bassin, Imperial
Visions : Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far
East, 1840-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
4. See among
others Jonathan Schlesinger, The Qing Invention of Nature: Environment and
Identity in Northeast China
and Mongolia, 1750-1850, 2012.
5. See Loretta Eumie Kim, “Marginal Constituencies: Qing Borderland
Policies and Vernacular Histories of Five Tribes on the Sino-Russian Frontier”
(Ph.D., Harvard University, 2009).
6. Lo-Shu Fu
(Compiler, Translator), Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations,
1644-1820, 1966, 238.
7. Thomas De Quincey,
Revolt of the Tartars and the English Mail-Coach (London: Bell, 1895).
8. Louis Dermigny, La
Chine et l’Occident: le commerce à Canton au XVIIIe siècle, 1719-1833 (Paris:
S.E.V.P.E.N., 1964), 1161–1198.
9. As quoted in Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars.
10. Gao Hao, 'The
Amherst embassy and British discoveries in China,' October 2014,History 99
(337) DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.12069.
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