Treaty of Nerchinsk

In August 1689, at the Siberian outpost of Nerchinsk, envoys of Russia and Qing China agreed a frontier along the rivers and mountains north of Manchuria. It was the first formal treaty China concluded with a European power, and it ended several years of clashes over the Amur valley. The settlement kept the two empires at peace in the region for well over a century and a half.

From around 1640, Russian fur hunters and Cossacks pushed south from Siberia into the Amur basin, land the Qing dynasty regarded as its own. The Manchu rulers were then still busy conquering Ming China, but by the 1680s they had secured the south and could turn north to a region they saw as the homeland of their ruling clan. Qing forces took the Russian fort at Albazin in 1685 and besieged it again in 1686, and most Russians were driven from the area.

After the first victory at Albazin, the Qing court wrote to Moscow, in Latin, proposing peace. The Tsardom of Russia, whose attention was fixed on Europe and on war with the Ottomans, sent the envoy Fyodor Golovin east. He left Moscow in January 1686 with 500 streltsy and reached Selenginsk, near Lake Baikal, in October 1687. A planned meeting there in 1688 was thwarted when the Oirat leader Galdan attacked the eastern Mongols, so the talks moved to Nerchinsk. The Qing delegation under Songgotu set out from Beijing in June 1689 with an escort that sources put at anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 soldiers.

The talks were conducted in Latin. The Jesuit missionaries Jean-François Gerbillon and Thomas Pereira interpreted for the Qing, and a Pole, Andrei Bielobocki, for the Russians. To avoid any suggestion that one party was calling on the other, the two delegations met in tents pitched side by side. The finished text carried none of the tributary language that Chinese diplomacy had traditionally required of foreigners, and scholars have suggested that the Kangxi Emperor used Manchu channels to sidestep his more conservative Han officials.

Each side had clear motives. The Qing wanted the Russians off the Amur and a settled frontier so that they could deal with the Dzungar Mongols in the west. Russia, unable to defend the Amur and keen on commerce, traded the river for secure possession of the lands beyond Lake Baikal and access to Chinese markets.

The treaty, dated 27 August 1689, was signed by Songgotu for the Kangxi Emperor and by Golovin for the joint tsars Ivan V and Peter I. The Latin text was authoritative, with Russian and Manchu versions; boundary stones were inscribed in Chinese, Manchu, Russian and Latin. Its six articles fixed the border along the Argun River and then up the Shilka and a small tributary, the Gorbitsa, before following the watershed of the Stanovoy range towards the Sea of Okhotsk. Russia gave up the land north of the Amur and agreed to abandon and destroy Albazin. The treaty also dealt with fugitives, allowed travel and trade with proper papers, and provided for lawbreakers who crossed the frontier to be returned. The area west of the Argun, then held by the Oirats, was left undefined.

The agreement opened China to Russian furs, and Russian merchants bought silk, porcelain, tea and precious metals in return. Towns such as Nerchinsk and Kyakhta became meeting points of Russian, Central Asian and Chinese commerce. The Treaty of Kiakhta of 1727 extended the frontier westward along what is now Mongolia's border. The arrangement held until a weakened Qing state lost the lands north of the Amur to the Russian Empire by the Treaty of Aigun in 1858, and the Pacific coast down to Vladivostok by the Convention of Peking in 1860.

Our 1650 map shows the Tsardom of Russia advancing across Siberia, and our 1700 map shows the frontier with the Qing dynasty soon after Nerchinsk.