THE GREAT GAME IN SIBERIA

The rivers that ran across these sprawling territories shaped all such expansionist exploits, blocking both Muscovite Cossack bands and Manchu-Chinese expeditions from sweeping across the continent, east to west, and forcing them to ply between these waterways, searching for fords and breaks in their flow. As colonist-explorers, merchants, and warriors (professional soldiers in the modern sense were still a rarity in the region in the seventeenth century) zigzagged their ways back and forth across this earth, the forces pushing them and the business that they brought constituting a flow all of its own. As the rivers flowed north to south, that most complex force of ‘empire’ pushed people and materiel latitudinally across central Eurasia, connecting East and West.

In one case in the year 1675, two diplomatic missions heading in opposite directions were pushed into contact with one another upon the River Yenisey. On this mighty river, a Muscovite ambassador-traveller met a pair of his Khalkha Mongol counterparts travelling from the embattled eastern Tüsheet khanate. Among the Chinggisid dynastic rulers that emerged after the collapse of the Mongol Empire, the Tüsheet khans led one of the two major Khalkha political communities of the time.

The Khalkha, the largest Mongol subgroup in modern Mongolia, have held a dominant position since the fifteenth century. By the late seventeenth century, the Tüsheet khan Chakhundorj (1634–1698) sought respite from relentless raids from Cossacks and pressure from rival Mongol factions, appealing to the tsar in Moscow for aid without falling too far into the orbit of either the Russian or Chinese empires.

It is only by looking at the phenomenon of empire as a dynamic process that encompassed cultural production, trade, diplomacy, and myriad facets of society, state, and culture that a complex picture dominated by individual people and their personal experiences emerges to historians. This is a picture definitively separated from the long-standing Russian historiographical myth of ‘adventurers’ going out to ‘assimilate’ Siberia. It is a fact that this was an often violent political landscape of harsh competition and extraction set against a backdrop of some of the harshest environs on the planet. But it also created a milieu that still resists teleology and modern ethno-national categorizations. Identities were formed and discarded; material goods made journeys half a world away from their places of origin; the blank spaces of the map were filled in with realities often as remarkable as the fantasies preceding them.

TThe work and travels of a man named Nikolai Gavrilovich Milescu-Spafariĭ (1636–1708; also known as Nicolae Milescu Spătaru in Romanian), who made the journey from Moscow to Beijing and back again in the years 1675–77, serves as a study par excellence of these processes of imperial expansion in central Eurasia in the seventeenth century. . Spafariĭ was a walking-talking example of someone who had bathed in the fast flow of empire in Eurasia and had been transmuted. A Moldavian nobleman exiled from his place of birth, Spafariĭ wandered into court in Moscow in 1673, missing, according to many sources, at least part of his nose, which had been taken as payment for his treason against his erstwhile liege, where he made a fast career as a translator, boldly taking his now-lost title—spatar, meaning ‘sword-bearer’, as a Russified surname.

Cosying up to the Muscovite foreign minister, Artamon Matveyev (1625–82), and his stable of Europhiles in the tsar’s capital, Spafariĭ secured a nomination to head the tsar’s embassy to the emperor of China in late 1674. In reality, this ‘embassy’ was more like a travelling geographical expedition, military reconnaissance mission, ethnographic adventure, and diplomatic overture all rolled into one. For more than two years, some 200 men under Spafariĭ’s command plied the rivers, forests, and steppes of the central Eurasian landmass, moving by boat, horse, camel, and on foot in the service of their tsar.

All the way, Spafariĭ wrote, and wrote, and wrote, producing a sizeable body of texts that would become his legacy. For although he was rewarded with a merely acceptable payment, his works were to be found in the collections of Russia’s elite for more than a century to come, narrating the geography and the peoples of the empire that they purported to rule and those of the Chinese Empire that they eyed so warily from across it. Just as the majority of his journey was spent not in China but in Siberian and Mongol territories, a great deal of Spafariĭ’s writings cover his encounters with the Siberian locals and Mongol power brokers, many of whom, critically, were themselves moving across the globe and pursuing their own goals and ventures.

Spafariĭ’s brief sojourn at the Siberian fort of Yeniseysk was one such encounter, bringing him in touch with one of the many Mongol worlds of the seventeenth century, through a chance meeting with the ambassadors of the Khalkha Mongol Тüsheet khan Chakhundorj. This crossing of paths added another point on the ink-spot trail of these Mongol ambassadors in the historical record, and in historical analysis, it provides a point of argument for the power of contingency in the flows of personnel, materiel, and information in seventeenth century Eurasia.

Just as Spafariĭ was in Yeniseysk on his journey to China, seeking to survey and record all that he saw, Chakhundorj’s two ambassadors, Shidishir Batur and Öndör Gegeen (1635–1723), were similarly making their way to Moscow to petition the tsar and weigh up everything they saw of the growing Muscovite presence. Just as Spafariĭ had, they had also come to Yeniseysk to register their presence in the tsar’s lands with the local governor. They were in many ways a mirror image of one another, the Mongols’ higher political status relative to Spafariĭ notwithstanding.

One of the Mongol ambassadors, already bearing the Buddhist title Öndör Gegeen (meaning ‘High Enlightened One’), was the son of Tüsheet Khan Gombodorj (1594–1655) and a direct descendant of Chinggis Khan. He would later rise to greater fame under the name Zanabazar, becoming the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the supreme head of the Gelug School, one of the four major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. In addition to his religious and political influence, he is widely regarded as one of Mongolia’s greatest painters and sculptors, as well as the creator of one of the varieties of the Mongolian script soyombo, which would later be used to write both Tibetan and Sanskrit. Still later, in the twentieth century, a genus of saurischian dinosaurs and several of its species would be named in his honor.

They met in the Cossack fort on the River Yenisey, which, Spafariĭ, in a charmingly idiosyncratic turn of phrase, praised as being ‘as spritely and grand as if it were the Danube itself’. Central Europe had come to Siberia, and it found itself at home. The Mongol noblemen and a notable Buddhist religious figure, Öndör Gegeen, met an exiled, scarred Orthodox Moldovan nobleman, if not as friends then at least as allies.

The Khalkha sought amnesty from the tsar for their warriors who had been imprisoned by the Cossacks as retribution for cross-border raids in exchange for potentially opening up their territories to provide passage to Muscovite servicemen and merchants. Spafariĭ sought information, any and all that he could get, about the lands surrounding them, and above all, about China.

The Khalkha Mongols of the Tüsheet khanate were not subjects of the tsar—in fact, Khan Chakhundorj maintained firmly pro-Chinese politics. And so, they could hardly be compelled to speak with Spafariĭ by any force in Yeniseysk. Yet, they met not once but three times, with Spafariĭ recording that he ‘hosted them most firmly’—a turn of phrase that implies alcoholic refreshments—and they spoke openly about affairs in the territories and communities of central Eurasia.

The Khalkha of the Tüsheet khanate had been embroiled in a long struggle with the Oirat Dzunghar khanate, which would eventually see them accept vassalhood to China and was the cause of the disturbances in the Mongol lands of eastern Siberia. Interestingly, we may deduce from Spafariĭ’s account that Shidishir Batur and Öndör Gegeen were relatively tight-lipped about their own affairs, instead feeding Spafariĭ information principally about the weaknesses of the young Qing Chinese state.

The Khalkha ambassadors explained to Spafariĭ that China was divided, split between the Manchurian Qing state that had conquered Beijing in 1644, and the ethnically Han Ming dynasty restorationists in the south of the country. At that time, the Qing were still fighting to put down their opposition, and thus their attention was drawn away from the northern border.

Spafariĭ clearly lost no time in drawing his own conclusions from this meeting because though the Khalkha do not seem to have spoken at length of their own situation, he wrote to Moscow soon after, pointing to what he—correctly, as time would prove—saw as a power vacuum along the developing Sino-Russian border:

Such an ‘earnest effort’ of imperial aggression was not, ultimately, forthcoming, as Spafariĭ imagined in his letter. Rather, his own encounter with the Khalkhas set the tone for the dynamics of empire in these central Eurasian lands. Exchange and barter were the order of the day, with Mongol communities and polities each negotiating their own settlements with both the Qing in China and the Romanovs in Russia. The Tüsheet khanate was not sent packing; instead, it formed a formal alliance with the Qing, and retained self-governance just a few decades after Spafariĭ’s meeting.

Spafariĭ and the Khalkhas cooperated positively, exchanging information before going their separate ways. The Khalkhas were soon sent to Moscow by the governor of Yeniseysk, where they were received with great pomp and ceremony and safely sent on their way back again, carrying a formal response from the tsar. In the meanwhile, Spafariĭ carried on his journey to Beijing, where he would encounter far stiffer resistance to his desires and ambitions. His time in China, however, is a separate story from the broader flow of empire among the Mongol communities of central Eurasia. What is important to stress is the personalism and mobility of affairs and communities in this period.

The distant and abstract interests and strategies of Moscow and Beijing may have driven empire, but it was the individuals who travelled and interacted with each other who forged the cross-cultural encounters. Spafariĭ’s writings on the geography and social fabric of central Eurasia were the record of his personal experiences and actual conversations with people like the Tüsheet khan’s ambassadors. This was not a world of cold suspicion and siloed communities struggling against each other for supremacy. Struggle, competition, and exploitation were absolute realities, but they occurred simply as parts of a vibrant milieu of contact and exchange. Öndör Gegeen, for example, was already a symbolically significant figure in Mongol Buddhism at the time he met Spafariĭ. He would go on, however, to forge personal relationships with the Kangxi Emperor—the fourth emperor of the Qin dynasty and the longest-serving ruler in Chinese history—and with various Mongol leaders, becoming a major religious and cultural figurehead for eastern Mongols at the close of the seventeenth century.

This encounter highlights the bilateral flows of people, materiel, and ideas through central Eurasia in the seventeenth century. People’s lived experiences at this time were not of distant myths and rumours, but of physical journeys across the steppes, forests, and rivers of their world, to meet different peoples and negotiate with them personally. Öndör Gegeen had personal experience of both Beijing and Moscow; he and his colleague Shidishir Batur had, after all, trekked a chest full of satins, silks, and Mongol handicrafts across Siberia, where they were pleasantly received as gifts to the tsar’s court. In return, they received the satisfaction of the tsar’s order to release all the Khalkha prisoners in Selenginsk and of their experiences of the tsar’s capital. Their stay in Moscow was not merely diplomatic—during their time there they had paid particularly close attention to the military qualities of the Muscovite state.

Spafariĭ, meanwhile, took with him new geographical information—leads on faster paths through the Siberian wilderness and into China and information about the politics of the steppe for the Muscovites to leverage to their advantage. As Spafariĭ wrote to the tsar:

Such information was as valuable as any silk or silver, for it was through such knowledge—composed of first-hand experience and the knowledge of locals like the Khalkha Mongols—that the Muscovite Empire was growing sinews in its Siberian territories, developing command and control over its newfound resources. Without individuals going out into unknown lands and risking life and limb to travel and to talk to their inhabitants, the state would not only be powerless—it would simply not exist as such.

Crucially, this is not in praise of empire or imperialism—forces that so often were inimical to the fundamental rights of people to their ways of life and, indeed, to their very lives themselves—or whoever was perpetrating it. What this moment in history shows us is the complexity of the flows of empire in central Eurasia. There was no simple, rising tide of empire, but instead, a complicated tapestry of individual interests and exchanges existed. Chinese silks and Mongol silverware were brought to the tables of Muscovite courtiers, while Siberian furs were sold to Chinese and Mongol nobles. Even biology was changed, with the growing movement of people and their conditioning of the environment. Spafariĭ praised the horses of Yeniseysk, hybrids, ‘mighty good and large, from mixed domestic and Kalmyk stock’. The imperial ambitions of Beijing and Moscow were as distant air fronts, rising and falling at the horizon, causing the winds to billow across the lands. These winds moved people, ideas, and things from East to West and back again, just as the rivers connected the mountains and the northern seas.