THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA
[Illustration: A MAID OF OLD MUSCOVY (From a painting by Venuga)]
THE RUSSIAN ROAD
TO CHINA
BY
LINDON BATES, JR.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY LINDON BATES, JR.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published May 1910_
CONTENTS
I. THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 1
II. THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 25
III. IN IRKUTSK 71
IV. SLEDGING THROUGH TRANSBAIKALIA 114
V. IN TATAR TENTS 173
VI. THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 220
VII. RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION 273
VIII. THE STORY OF THE HORDES 322
IX. CHINA 364
ILLUSTRATIONS
A MAID OF OLD MUSCOVY _Frontispiece_
From a painting by Venuga
YERMAK’S EXPEDITION TO SIBIR, ATTACKED BY THE TATARS 8
From a painting by Surikova
CHURCH OF ST. BASIL, MOSCOW 20
Ivan the Terrible blinded its architect that he might never
duplicate the masterpiece
BRIDGE OVER THE IRTISH 38
ALONG THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY 38
DINING-CAR SALOON--VIEW OF THE LIBRARY 46
CITIES OF NEW RUSSIA--TIUMEN, TOMSK, PERM 50
ISLAND OF KALTIGEI, LAKE BAIKAL 68
VILLAGE OF LISTVIANITCHNOE, LAKE BAIKAL 68
THE ANGARA RIVER, IRKUTSK 76
THE CATHEDRAL, IRKUTSK 76
A CHAPEL IN IRKUTSK 86
BOLSHOISKAIA, IRKUTSK 86
THE BAZAAR, IRKUTSK 90
THE ICE-BREAKER, YERMAK--LAKE BAIKAL 98
THE ORGANIZERS OF THE CHITA REPUBLIC 108
BAIKAL STATION 116
THE HIGHLANDS OF TRANSBAIKALIA 116
SLEDGING SOUTHWARDS 126
SIBERIAN TYPES--PEASANT, VILLAGE STOREKEEPER 136
PEASANT TYPES 150
A CHICKOYA GIRL 164
A TROITZKOSAVSK STUDENT 164
A WAYSIDE TEMPLE 178
A MONGOL BELLE AND HER YURTA 186
A ZABAIKALSKAIA BURIAT 186
A MONGOL “BLACK MAN” 206
TEMPLE OF GIGIN, URGA 222
TEMPLE IN THE URGA LAMASERY 228
A PROSTRATING PILGRIMAGE 234
A GRAND LAMA 244
CHINESE MANDARIN 256
GIGIN, THE LIVING BUDDHA 256
CHINESE ARCHWAY, URGA MAIMACHEN 262
THE GREAT WALL 270
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW 282
RUSSIAN TYPES--DRAGOON, CONSTABLE 292
STREET SCENES IN MOSCOW 302
(The Tverskaia Gate, Loubianskaia Place)
RUSSIAN TYPES--PEDDLER, POLICEMAN 316
THE MIRACLE OF ATTILA’S REPULSE 332
(From the painting by Raphael in the Vatican)
ON THE ROAD TO THE MING TOMBS 342
THE GLORY IS DEPARTED 360
THE BRIDGE AND TABLETS IN PEI-HAI 368
HSUEN-WU GATE, PEKING 374
PEKING, WHERE THE ALLIES’ MAIN ASSAULT WAS MADE 380
SUMMER PALACE OF THE EMPEROR 388
MAP OF ASIA, SHOWING ROUTE FROM MOSCOW TO PEKING 392
THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA
I
THE PATH OF THE COSSACK
An ancient way leads across northern Asia to the Chinese borderland.
The steel of the great Siberian Railroad harnesses now the stretch
which mounts the Urals, pierces the steppes, winds through the Altai
foothills, and by cyclopean cuts and tunnels girdles Lake Baikal. From
Verhneudinsk southward, it has remained as an ancient post-road leading
through the Trans-Baikal highlands to the frontier garrison town of
Kiahta. Over the Mongolian border at Maimachen, it has narrowed into a
camel-trail threading the barren hills to the encampment of the Tatar
hordes at holy Urga. Thence it strikes across the sandy wastes of Gobi,
and passes the ramparts of the Great Wall of China, on its way toward
Peking and the Pacific.
Through five centuries this road has been building. Cossacks blazed its
way; musketoon-armed Strelitz, adventuring traders, convicts condemned
for sins or sincerity, land-seeking peasants, exiled dissenters,
voyaging officials--all have trampled it. Hiving workmen under
far-brought engineers have pushed the rails onward, bridging the chasms
and heaping the defiles. Following it eastward, unpeopled wastes have
been sown to homesteads, hamlets have grown into cities. To the very
gateway of China it has led the Muscovite. It is the path of Slavic
advance.
The way scarcely passed Novgorod in the early sixteenth century when
the great family of the Stroganovs, a “kindred in Moscovie called
the sonnes of Anika living neare the Castle of Saint Michael the
Archangel,” began the fur-trade with the Samoied tribesmen from
Siberia, who paddled down the Wichida River to barter peltries
with the Russians. The prudent merchant Anika, looking to a more
permanent source for those valued furs than the irregular visits of
the aborigines, planned to anticipate his brother traders in their
purchases. He sent east with a band of returning Samoieds some of
his own henchmen carrying, for traffic with the inhabitants, “divers
base merchandise, as small bels, and other like Dutch small wares.”
The agents returned to report what impressed them most. There were
no cities. The Samoieds were “lothsome in feeding,”--even a Russian
frontiersman might shrink from the cud of a reindeer’s stomach as
food,--and knew neither corn nor bread. They were cunning archers,
whose arrows were headed with sharpened stones and fishbones. They were
clad in skins, wearing in summer the furry side outward and in winter
inward. They willingly gave sable-skins for Dutch bells.
A series of trading expeditions began, which made the Stroganovs so
enormously wealthy that “the kindred of Anika knew no ends of their
goods.” Indeed, they gained so much by this exploitation that they
began to fear the application by the Czar’s agent of a monetary test
of patriotism. So, by a stroke of finance not unknown in modern days,
there was arranged the Russian equivalent for carrying five thousand
shares of Metropolitan. A block of small wares for the account of the
Czar’s brother-in-law, Boris, was added to the stock in an especially
important expedition among the Samoieds and Ostiaks. The adventurers
got far inland. They saw men riding on elks, and sledges drawn by
dogs. They returned with wonderful tales of marksmanship, and, more
important, brought back enough furs to give Boris a dividend, in
gratitude for which he secured to the Stroganovs the grant of an
enormous tract of land along the Kama River and a monopoly of the trade
with the aborigines.
The Stroganovs grew and thrived. They scattered trading-posts and
factories along the river-highways and sent many parties into the
interior to barter. In the half-century following old Anika’s
expedition, they had carried the Slavic way to the Urals.
In the summer of 1578, when Maxim Stroganov was ruling over the family
estates along the Kama, one Yermak, heading a fugitive band of
Cossacks, tattered and spent, with dented armor and drooping ponies,
straggled into camp and offered service. With great delicacy Maxim
forbore pressing too closely his inquiry into their antecedents. It
might have wounded Yermak’s susceptibilities to avow that his chief
lieutenant, Ivan Koltso, was under sentence of death for capturing and
sacking a town of the Nogoy, and that the immediate cause of his advent
was an army of Imperial Strelitz, which had driven his band from the
Volga District for piracy and highway robbery.
The situation on the far side of the Urals, where the skin-hunting
tribes had been conquered by a roving horde of Tatars under Kutchum
Khan, was at this time interfering sadly with the Stroganovs’ fur
business. Eight hundred Cossacks, furthermore, of shady character and
urgent needs were undesirable neighbors. So the prudent Maxim, not
particularly solicitous as to which of the two might be eliminated,
offered Yermak a supply of new muskets if he would go away and fight
the Tatars. They were not pleasant people for the Cossacks to meet,
these former masters of Moscow. But behind were the soldiers of Ivan
the Terrible. With a possible conquest before, and the Strelitz behind,
Yermak gladly chose to invade the Tatar territory, which is now western
Siberia.
Up the Chusovaya River the little expedition started in 1579,
damming the stream with sails to get the boats across its shallows.
Penetrating far into the mountains, the band reached a point where a
portage could be made across the Ural water-shed. Then they headed down
the Tura River into Siberia. Here the invaders met the first army of
the Tatars under Prince Yepancha, and with small loss drove them back.
Yermak made his winter camp on the site of the present city of Tiumen.
Next year the advance began once more. The Khan of the Tatars, Kutchum,
was alive to the seriousness of the incursion, and prepared to ambush
the Cossack flotilla as it descended the Tura. At a chosen spot chains
were stretched across the stream, and bowmen were stationed on the
banks to await the coming of Yermak and overwhelm with arrows his
impeded forces. The Tatar sentries above the ambuscade signaled the
coming of the boats; all eyes were turned intently upstream. Then
Yermak’s soldiers fell upon them from the rear, to their total surprise
and his complete victory. Straw-stuffed figures in Cossack garments had
come down in the boats; the men themselves had made a land-circuit and
had struck the enemy unprepared.
In defense of his threatened capital, Sibir, the old Khan rallied once
more. He assembled a great army, thirty times that of the Cossacks.
For the invaders, however, retreat was more perilous than advance.
Yermak went on, and in a great fight on the banks of the Irtish, again
prevailed. With his forces reduced by battle and disease to some three
hundred effectives, he entered Sibir on October 25, 1581. A few days
later the Ostiak tribes, glad to escape their Koran-coercing masters,
proffered their allegiance, and the Cossack saddle was on Siberia.
But how precarious was their seat! Southward were the myriads of the
unconquered hordes of Tatary; only one of the score of their khans had
been vanquished. As thistledown is blown before the wind, so could
Yermak’s oft-decimated band have been swept away had once the march of
the Mongols’ main division turned northward. Girding him round were the
self-submitting Ostiaks, loyal for the moment to those who had won them
freedom from the old proselyting overlord, but not long to be relied
upon once the weight of Cossack tribute--the fur-yassak--began to be
felt.
But what the Tatar hordes had not, what the Ostiak hunters had not, the
three hundred Cossacks had--a man. This man, starting his march as the
hunted captain of a band of outlaws, could conquer half a continent.
Then over the heads of his employers, the mighty family of Stroganov,
over the heads of governors of provinces, of boyars, of ministers
to the throne, he could send by his outlaw lieutenant, Ivan Koltso,
loftily, imperially, as a prince to a king, his offer of the realm of
Siberia to Ivan Vasilevich.
Ivan the Terrible, Czar of all the Russias, he who had blinded the
architect of St. Basil, lest he plan a second masterpiece; he who had
tortured and slain a son, hated less for his intrigues than for his
unroyal weakness, responded imperially. Over the long versts Ivan’s
courier carried to Yermak a pardon, confirmation as ruler of the
newly-won realm and the Czar’s own mantle, an honor accorded only to
the greatest, the boyars of Muscovy. Following the messenger eastward
there plodded three hundred musket-armed Strelitz to bear aid to the
Cossack garrison. Sorely now were these reinforcements needed, for
the Ostiak tribes flamed into rebellion against King Stork. With
Kutchum’s Tatars, they returned to the attack and besieged Sibir. Once
again, though hemmed about by the multitude of his enemies, the valor
of Yermak saved his cause. In a totally unexpected sally, in June,
1584, the Tatar camp was surprised, a great number massacred, and the
besiegers scattered.
The whole country, however, save only the city of Sibir, was still in
arms. Engagements between small parties were constant. Ivan Koltso,
striving to open a way for a trader’s caravan, fell with his fifty, cut
down to the last man. Yermak, marching out to avenge him, was himself
surprised near the Irtish. With Ulysses-like adroitness, he and two
followers escaped the massacre and reached the river-bank, where a
small skiff promised safety. Leaping last for the boat, Yermak fell
short, and, weighted with his armor, sank in the river that he had
given to Russia. The two Cossack soldiers alone floated down to their
comrades.
One hundred and fifty, all that were left of them, started their long
homeward retreat. Far from Sibir, they met a hundred armed men sent by
the Czar. Great was the spirit, not unworthy of the dead leader, that
turned them back, to march to a site twelve miles from Sibir, where
they built their own town, now the city of Tobolsk.
In the years that followed, their nomad enemies drifted south,
leaving those behind who cared not for their old khan’s quarrels. The
phlegmatic Ostiaks returned to their hunting and to their feasts of
uncooked fox-entrails. The long fight had rolled past, leaving the
Slavic way undisputed to the Irtish.
Well it was, for no more of the Strelitz marched to the aid of the
garrisons. Russia was in the throes of civil war and invasion,--the
long-remembered “Smutnoe Vremya,” time of troubles. Boris Godunov, once
favorite of Ivan the Terrible, became the real ruler in the reign of
the weak Feodor. On the death of this prince, with the heir-apparent
Dimitri suspiciously slain, he had mounted the empty throne, and a
pretender, claiming to be Dimitri miraculously escaped, had risen up
in Poland, gained the support of the king, and marched against Boris.
Though the Polish army was routed, Boris succumbed shortly after to a
poison-hastened demise.
[Illustration: YERMAK’S EXPEDITION TO SIBIR ATTACKED BY THE TATARS
(From a painting by Surikova)]
Dimitri attacked the new czar, captured Moscow, and was crowned in the
Kremlin by the Poles. A revolution followed within a year, in which
the pseudo-Dimitri was slain. Meanwhile the Poles were devastating
Russia more cruelly than had the old Tatar conquerors. At length Minim
the butcher of Novgorod led a popular revolt, which in 1613 carried to
the throne Michael, the first of the Romanovs.
Through all these years, despite the fact that anarchy and chaos
rioted over Muscovy, despite the fact that no troops came to aid in
the advance, the Cossacks still pressed their way, contested by the
scattered bands of Tatars, and farther on by the Buriats, the Yakuts,
the Koriats. After these fighters and conquerors came the traders and
colonists, with their families, following along the road that had been
won. The valleys of the great Siberian rivers, which so short a time
before had been the grazing-grounds of the Tatars, became dotted now
with the farms of the new-come settlers. The advance guards of the
fur-traders, with blockhouses guarding the portages, and clustering
wooden huts and churches, pushed south and east as far as Kuznetz, at
the head of navigation on the River Tom, and to the foot of the Altai
Mountains. North and east the trade-route was advanced to the Yenesei,
twenty-two hundred miles inland. As many as sixty-eight hundred sables
went back to Russia in 1640, together with great quantities of fox,
ermine, and squirrel-skins.
The quaint volumes of “Purchas his Pilgrimes,” published in 1625,
tell of some of the early explorations. A band of Cossacks dared the
upper Yenesei, which “hath high mountains to the east, among which
are some that cast out fire and brimstone.” They made friends of the
cave-dwelling Tunguses in this region, who were themselves stirred
to explore, and went on far eastward to another river, less than the
Yenesei but as rapid. By faster running the Tunguses caught some of
the inhabitants, who pointed across the river and said “Om! Om!” The
old chronicler diligently records the speculation as to what “Om! Om!”
could mean. Some thought that it signified thunder, others held it a
warning that the great beyond teemed with devils. These unfortunate
slow-running natives died, “probably of fright,” when the Tunguses, in
a spirit as naïvely unfeeling as if they were collecting curios, were
taking them back to be exhibited to their friends the Cossacks. How
far these Tunguses had pierced cannot be told. In one of the dialects
of the Yakuts who live beyond Baikal, “ta-oom” or “tanak-hoom” means
“greetings.” Had the Tunguses and the Cossacks who followed them
arrived at the Yakuts’ country? Or was the river on which passed “ships
with sails” and beyond which was heard the booming of brazen bells
the Amur? Were those the junks and temple-gongs of the Manchus? _Ni
snaia_,--who knows?
In 1637 the Cossacks reached and established themselves in Yakutsk. In
1639 by the far northern route they pierced to the Sea of Okhotsk. In
1644 a party reached the delta of the Kalyma, and curiously speculated
upon the mammoth tusks which they found. In 1648, on the Cellinga
River beyond Lake Baikal they built Fort Verhneudinsk. Had their tide
of conquest now rolled southward, up the Cellinga Valley, the Russian
Eagles might to-day be flying over Peking. Only the Kentai Mountains
were between them and prostrate Mongolia, enfeebled by the internecine
warfare of her rival khans. From Mongolia, the road, worn by so many
conquerors of old, leads fair and clear to the Chi-li Province and the
heart of China.
But they passed this gateway by, those old Cossack heroes, as the
railway builders have passed it by, to press with Poyarkov to the
Pacific; to conquer, with Khabarov, the Amur; to meet in desperate
conflict the whale-skin cuirassed Koriats of the coast; to battle with
the Manchu in conflicts where “by the Grace of God and the Imperial
good fortune, and our efforts, many of those dogs were slain”; to fight
until but an unvanquished sixty-eight were left of the garrison of
eight hundred in beleaguered Albazin.
The current of conquest passed by this door to China, but the swelling
stream of commerce searched it out. In 1638, the Boyar Pochabov,
crossing Baikal on the ice, broke the first way to Urga, the capital of
the Mongolian Great Khan, and gained the friendship of the monarch. In
the interests of trade, the deputies of the Czar Alexei Michailovitch
followed up the opening with an embassy in 1654 to the Chinese Emperor
himself. Over steppe and mountain and desert the mission wound its
weary way to Kalgan, the outpost city beside the Chinese Wall, and then
on to Peking, bearing to the Bogdo Khan, the Yellow Czar, the presents
of Chagan Khan, the White Czar.
From the Forbidden Palace at Peking were started back, four years
later, return presents, including ten _puds_ of the first tea that
reached Russia. With the presents came a message that drove flame into
the bearded cheeks of the Czar and set his Muscovite boyars to grasping
their sword-hilts. “In token of our especial good-will we send gifts in
return for your tribute.” Thus, the Chinese Emperor.
The answer of the Czar started another legation plodding across a
continent, and the retort was thrown at the feet of his Yellow Majesty.
It was a summons forthwith to tender his vassalage to Russia. The
Czar’s gauntlet had been hurled across Asia. But all it brought was
beggary to the traders who had begun to press along the newly-opened
route to a commercial conquest of the East.
Soon Russia regretted the fruitage of her challenge. In 1685 Golovin’s
embassy left Moscow, and, arriving two years later at Verhneudinsk,
opened negotiations with Peking. A Chinese commission then made its way
north, and at Nerchinsk, August 27, 1689, was signed the famous treaty
closing to Russia her Amur outlet to the Pacific, purchased with such
desperate valor at Albazin, but granting to a limited number of Russian
merchants trading privileges into China.
A lively traffic at once sprang up. Long caravans, silk- and tea-laden,
crossed the Mongolian deserts, the Siberian steppes and hills, and the
forested Urals, taking the road to Europe. A little Russian settlement
was founded at Peking, and a traders’ caravansary was built. The church
constructed by the prisoners of Albazin, who had been so kindly treated
by the Manchus that they at first refused the release which the treaty
brought, gave place to a larger edifice erected by popes from Russia.
Soon, however, the Russians again offended the Celestial Emperor. In
their riotous living, the quickly enriched merchants disquieted the
sober Chinese. The Siberians over the frontier gave asylum to a band
of seven hundred Mongol free-booters, whom it was urgently desired to
present to a Chinese headsman. So commerce was forbidden anew, and
most of the reluctant merchants left their compound. Some stayed and
assimilated with the Chinese, retaining, however, their religion; and
for years a mixed race observed in Peking the rites of Greek Orthodox
Christianity.
It may seem strange that rulers so energetic as Peter the Great and
some of his successors took no steps to resent by force of arms the
arbitrary acts of the Chinese Emperor. But much was going on in
Russia; Peter was occupied with his invasion of Persia, and Catherine
was without taste for a distant and doubtful campaign. The garrisons
scattered over the enormous area of Siberia were numerically too weak
and too poorly equipped to do more than hold their own. So, when
commerce was once more interdicted and the merchants banished, recourse
was had to diplomacy. In 1725 the Bogdo Khan relented enough to receive
Count Ragusinsky with a special embassy from Catherine the First, which
arranged the second great agreement with China, called the Treaty of
Kiahta.
By it the frontier cities of Kiahta in Siberia, and Maimachen, facing
it just across the line in Mongolia, were established as the gateway
to Chinese trade. The treaty provided for the extradition of bandits
and for a perpetual peace and friendship between the high contracting
parties. Ever since, the citizens of Kiahta have alternately blessed
and blamed Ragusinsky,--blamed him because, in the fear lest any stream
flowing out of Chinese into Russian territory should be poisoned, he
settled the boundary city beside a Siberian brook so inadequate that
Kiahtans have suffered ever since for lack of water, with the river
Bura only nine versts away in China; blessed him because of the great
prosperity the treaty brought to their doors.
The tea carried by this highway became Russia’s national drink. Great
warehouses arose, built caravansary-wise around courts. Endless files
of two-wheeled carts rolled northward, bearing each its ten square
bales of tea, or its well-packed bolts of silk. The merchants grew
wealthy in the rapidly swelling trade.
A great Chinese embassy, headed by the third ranking official of
the Peking Foreign Office, made its way to Moscow to keep permanent
the relations of the two empires. Similarly, a Russian embassy was
established in the rebuilt compound in Peking, where a new church
arose, whose archimandrite gained a comfortable revenue by selling
ikons and crucifixes to the many Chinese converts he had baptized.
Catherine the Second’s edict opened to all Russians the freedom of
Chinese trade. Its volume, large before, became now even greater. In
1780 the registered commerce at Kiahta had risen to 2,868,333 roubles,
not to mention the large value of the goods taken in unregistered.
Tea, a pound of which, if of best quality, cost two roubles in those
days, silks, porcelains, cottons, and tobacco, went north, exchanged
for Russian peltries, for cloth, hardware, and, curiously enough,
hunting-dogs.
An English merchant, who had penetrated to Kiahta in that year, gives
an amusing account of the mutual distrust with which the barter was
conducted. The Russian going over the frontier to Maimachen would
examine the goods in the Chinese warehouse, seal up what he desired,
and leave two men on guard. The Chinese merchant would then come to
Kiahta, and do the same with the Russian’s wares. When the bargain was
struck, both together carried one shipment over the border with guards
and brought back the exchange.
In growing prosperity, undisturbed, the Kiahta caravans came and went,
while elsewhere history was warm in the making.
Napoleon marched to Moscow, to Leipsic, to Waterloo. The Kiahta
caravans came and went. The St. Petersburg Dekabrists rose for
Constantine and the Constitution. The Kiahta caravans came and went.
The Crimean War saw the Russian flag flutter down at Sevastopol. Even
as the Malakoff was stormed, a Russian army marched into Central Asia
to seize the Zailust Altai slope, which points as a spear toward
Turkestan and India, and a Russian navy sailed under Muraviev to occupy
the forbidden Amur. The Kiahta caravans came and went.
At length a railroad, pushed year by year, reached the Pacific. One
branch cut across the reluctantly-accorded Manchurian domain to
Vladivostok; another struck southward to Dalny and Niu-chwang. The
Russian Eagles perched at Port Arthur and nested by the far Pacific.
The camel-commerce of the old overland road across Mongolia shrank
now as shrinks a Gobi snow-rivulet under the burning desert sun. The
meagre Kiahta caravans became but a gaunt shadow of the mighty past.
Only an intermittent wool-export and a dwindling traffic in tea to
the border cities remained of the great tribute of the Urga Road. As
trade vanished from their once busy warehouses, the Chinese merchants
were troubled. Perhaps to prayer and sacrifice the God of Commerce
would relent? So a scarlet temple rose on the hill by Maimachen.
Prosperity came suddenly once again, a new trade rolled north over the
historic way. The Mongol cart-drivers returned from far Ulasati. The
camel-trains, that had scattered south to the trails beyond Shama,
gathered back as antelopes herd to a new spring in the desert.
The God of the Red Temple, the God of the Caravan, had sent the
Japanese. As the Amban’s executioner strikes off a victim’s hand, so
had the Nipponese lopped away the railroad reaching down to Dalny and
Niu-chwang--the road that was breaking the camel-trade a thousand
versts beyond, on the old route by Maimachen and Kiahta. Against the
Russian control of the Pacific the Japanese had hurled all their
gathered might. By battle genius and efficiency the Island soldiers
won, and athwart the front of Slavic empire they set their desperate
legions. Far more was lost to Russia than men and squandered treasure,
far more than prestige and power of place. The enormous stakes, even
in the port of Dalny, in the forts of Port Arthur, in the East China
Railway, were but incidents. The real tragedy of the war was that the
vital terminus of her continent railroad was alienated, and that her
civilization was barred back indefinitely.
The soldiers and statesmen who carried Russia’s power across a savage
continent had sought out many inventions. But by whatever means
each successive territory was won, its maintenance had been by the
warrant that the Slavs had gone not lightly, adventuring to conquest,
but as an earnest host clearing a way for the homes and the hearths
of their race. The colonist had followed the Cossack; cities and
villages, railways and telegraphs, had risen behind the armies. The
dawn of the twentieth century saw a mighty expanse of Siberia redeemed
from a desolate waste to a land of farms and villages, of mines and
industries; a native population, once hardly superior to the American
Indian, not, like him, displaced and exterminated, but raised side
by side with the settlers to a more equitable place than is held by
any other subject people in Asia. The Russian advance had brought
the establishment of the volunteer fleet plying from far Odessa to
Vladivostok, and the completion of the greatest railway enterprise
the world has ever seen. It had opened from Europe to the Far East
a land-route more important to more people than the water-route
discovered by Vasco da Gama. The fruition of a nation’s hope was lost
when the Eagles went down at Port Arthur.
For those who feast at Russia’s cost the reckoning is long.
Predecessors not unfamed are worthy of remembrance: the Tatars who
lorded it four hundred years, the Poles whose kings caroused in the
Kremlin, the great Emperor, with his Grande Armée, whose stabled horses
scarred the walls of St. Basil, the Turks, the Swedes,--all conquerors
of yesterday. But long years must take their toll of life and gold
before Russia can carry the entrenched lines along the Yalu, and
reënter the redoubts hewn in the sterile hills around Port Arthur. The
spoils to the victors for the present are unchallenged. The Russian way
to China is not now through Manchuria.
But the ancient road of the Kiahta caravans is still unblocked. Here
is the shortest route from Europe to the East. Here, through the
defiles and the broken foothills of the Gobi Plateau, lies the future
redemption of the great unfettered land-route to North China. The
Chinese are themselves advancing to anticipate it. They have already
built into Kalgan. To this trading-centre across the pale, a Russian
railway may yet pass and her colonists make fruitful the unpeopled
wilds of Mongolia.
In the cycles of progress old paths are reworn. Pharaoh’s canal from
the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was swallowed up under the sands of
three thousand years when the Genoans won a way across the Isthmus.
Their track was left unsought when the Portuguese showed the route for
ships around the Cape. Yet to-day the Strait of Suez is thronged with
reborn commerce.
The first American highway to the Western Reserve was superseded by
the better avenue of the newly built Erie Canal, yet came to its own
again beneath the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio. So, far to the
westward of Japan’s outpost, the age-old caravan road, with a shadowy
fantastic history dim as its dun trail across the desert, may rise to a
resurrected glory as a new road to China.
Its greatness is of yesterday and of to-morrow. Unto to-day belongs the
quaintness of the cavalcade that passes to and fro along its track.
Over the frozen snows of winter and the rocky trails of summer there
plod horse and ox and camel, sleigh and wagon and cart,--a broken line
of men and beasts. Russian posts thunder past with galloping horses,
three abreast. Bands of Cossacks convoy the guarded camel-trains of
heavy mail for China. One meets troops of boyish recruits, singing
lustily in chorus on the tramp northward, and Mongol carts and
flat-featured Buriats on their little shaggy ponies, sleepy wooden
villages, forests, steppes, swamps, frozen river-courses, mountain
passes.
Through the kaleidoscope of races and peoples one moves in a
world-forgotten life, a procession of the ages.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. BASIL, MOSCOW (Ivan the Terrible blinded
its architect that he might never duplicate the masterpiece)]
On the threshold of Siberia the traveler has turned back in manner, in
ways of thought, in government, in everything, to the past. Go into one
of these cities,--you are in the Germany of 1849, with the embers still
hot of the fire lighted by the republican movement of the young men
and the industrials. The seeming chance of victory has passed them
by. The iron hand is over all. One hears of Siberian Carl Schurzes,
fugitives to America and to Switzerland, of the month-lived Chita
Republic, of the row of gallows at Verhneudinsk, of the bloody assizes
at Krasnoyarsk.
It is as if one lived when citizens gathered in excited groups in the
Forum to discuss the news from Philippi; or as if, from the broken
masonry of the Tuileries, there stepped out into breathing actuality
the five hundred Marseillaises “who know how to die,” fronting the
red Swiss before the palace of Louis, the King. Here is the reality
of friends in hiding, of files of soldiers at each railway-station,
of police-examined passports without which one cannot sleep a night
in town, of arms forbidden, meetings forbidden, books forbidden,--all
things forbidden. Here as there men thought that the new could come
only by revolution. Yet one can see, despite all, the germs of
improvement and the upward pressures of evolution.
Move further toward the frontier towns, where the relayed horses
bring the weekly mail,--you have gone back a hundred and fifty years.
You are among our own ancestors of the days of the Stamp Act. Did
the General Howe who governs the oblast from his Irkutsk residency
overhear the school-boys of Troitzkosavsk as they chant the forbidden
_Marseillaise_, he, too, might say that freedom was in the air. These
Siberian frontiersmen shoot the deer with their permitted flint-locks
as straight as the neighbors of Israel Putnam, and with spear and gun
they face the bear that the dusky Buriat hunters have tracked to its
lair.
Our Puritans are there, rugged, red-bearded dissenters, “Stare’
Obriachi,” Old Believers, they are called, who came to Siberia
rather than use Bishop Nikon’s amended books of prayer. Yankee-like,
outspoken, keen at a trade, are these big Siberian sons of men who
dared greatly in their long frozen march. The grants to Lord Baltimores
and Padroon Van Rensselaers are in the vast “cabinetski” estates of the
grand-ducal circle, engulfing domains great as European kingdoms.
Go into one of the villages of the peasants transplanted in a body by
the paternal Government. Here are the patient, enduring recruits for
the army, brothers to the toilers over whose fields the Grand Monarch’s
wars rolled back and forth. Though steeped in ignorance and overwhelmed
by the incubus of communism, they are capable of real and splendid
manhood, and will show it when their world has struggled through into
the century in which we others live.
Go to a mining-camp in the Chickoya Valley. It is California and the
days of ’49. Histories as romantic as those of the Sierras are being
lived out in its unsung gorges,--tales of hardships, of grub-stakes, of
bonanzas in Last Chance Gulches.
When the bumping tarantass rolls across the Chinese frontier into
Mongolia, it enters a kingdom of the Middle Ages flung down into the
twentieth century. Feudal princes, lords of armies weaponed with spear
and bow, tax and drive to the corvée their nomad serfs. A hierarchy
of priests whose divine head lives in a palace at Holy Urga, sways
the multitude of superstition-steeped Mongols, and receives the
homage of pilgrims wending their way from Siberia, from the Volga,
from Tibet, from all Mongolia, to their Canterbury of Lamaism. In
prostrate devotion the penitents girdle the Sacred City before whose
hovels beggars dispute with dogs their common nourishment, and in
whose compounds princes of the race of Genghis Khan, with armies of
retainers, live bedless, bathless, lightless, in the felt huts of
their race. Squalid magnificence and good-humored kindly hospitality
are linked to utter brutality. Sable-furs and silks cover sheepskins
worn until they drop from the body. Here and there among the natives a
Chinese trading caravansary, alien, walled, peculiar, stands as of old
the Hansa-town, with merchant guilds and far-brought caravan goods.
A way of adventure and strangeness, where the years turn back, is this
old road of the Golden Horde, leading down past the ancestral homes of
the Turks to the Great Wall.
The Cossack sentries at Kiahta look Chinaward. They have become an
anomaly, this hard-riding, fierce-fighting soldier class. The plow has
metamorphosed into myriad farms the plains along the Don where once
their ponies grazed. Mining-cuts score the hills in the Urals where
once they hunted. Villages of Slavonic peasants rise along the Amur.
The sons of the old warriors grow into peaceful farmer-folk, differing
in name alone from their blue-eyed neighbors. Soon they must disappear
in all save picturesquely uniformed Hussars of the Guard, and as a
memory, chanted by young men and girls in the Siberian summer evenings
when Yermak’s song is raised. The task of the Cossack, to lead in the
conquest of kindred native races and to weld these through themselves
into Russia’s fabric, is nearly done.
Down the ancient road lies a last avenue of advance. Eastward is
Manchuria, where artillery and science grappling must decide the day
with Japan. Southward is India, where England’s guarded gateway among
the hills can be opened only from behind. But into Mongolia Fate may
decree that the yellow-capped Cossacks, drafted from Russia’s Mongol
Buriats, shall lead once more the nation-absorbing march of the White
Czar. For another memorable ride, the Cossacks, who on their shaggy
ponies led the long conquering way across the continent, may yet mount
and take the road to China.
II
THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY
How long to Irkutsk? Seven days now, seven years when last I
came.” The bearded Russian standing in the doorway of the adjoining
compartment in the corridor-car of the Siberian Express gazes
thoughtfully at the fir-covered slope, whose dark green stands in
sombre contrast to the winter snows. The train is slowly climbing the
Ural Range, toward the granite pyramid near Zlatoust, on opposite
sides of which are graven “Europe” and “Asia.” Neighbors with easy
sociability are conversing along the wide corridors, exchanging stories
and cigarettes, asking each other’s age and income in naïve Siberian
style.
Regarding the burly occupant of the next stateroom one may discreetly
speculate. From sable-lined paletot and massive gold chains you hazard
that he voyaged with the traders’ slow caravans in the days before the
railway--that he was a merchant.
“A merchant? _Optovi?_ No, I did not come with the caravans.”
From the triangle of red lapel-ribbon, the rank-bestowing decoration,
you venture a second guess.
“Perhaps the _gaspadine_ made the great circuit to oversee the local
administrations? He was a government inspector--_Revizor?_”
“_Chinovnik niet navierno_,” he answers. Most decidedly he was not an
official. The suggestion causes him to smile broadly. “I was with the
convicts,” he says.
Beside the line of rails curves the old post-road winding like a ribbon
through the highlands.
“It was by that road we marched. Seven years of my life lie along it.”
The train swings through a cleft hewn in the living rock, steep-sided
as if the mountain had been gashed with a mighty axe. It rumbles around
the base of an overhanging crag while you look clear down over the
white valley, with the miles of rolling green forest beyond.
“Was not seven years a long time for the march?” you venture.
“For a traveler, yes; for convict bands not unusual. We went back and
forth, now northward a thousand versts as to Archangel, now west as
to Moscow, now south as to Rostov. Again and again our troop would
split, and part be sent another way. New prisoners would be added, from
Warsaw, Finland, Samara. New guards would take charge. Some groups
would go to the West Siberian stations, some east to the Pacific and
Sakhalin. I, who was written down for ten years at the Petrovski Works
beyond Baikal Lake, with a third commuted for good behavior, had
finished my term before I got there.”
“Why did they wander so aimlessly?”
“It seems truly as a butterfly’s flight, but you others do not know the
way of Russia. Very slowly, very deviously she goes, but surely, none
the less, to her goal. We each came at last to our place.”
A match flares up and he lights another cigarette.
“Shall we not go to the ‘wagon restoran’ for a glass of tea?” you ask.
Along the broad aisles you walk, past the staterooms, filled with
baggage, littered with bedding, kettles, novels, and fur overcoats.
Everything is in direst confusion, and the owners are sandwiched
precariously between their belongings. On the little tables which are
raised between the seats, they are playing endless games of cards,
sipping tea and nonchalantly smoking cigarettes the while. You pass the
stove-niches at the car entrances, heaped to the ceiling with cut wood.
The fire-tenders as you pass give the military salute. You cross the
covered bridges between the cars, where are little mounds of the snow
that has sifted in around the crevices; and a belt of cold air tells
of the zero temperature outside. At length the double doors of the
foremost car appear ahead, and crossing one more arctic zone over the
couplings, you can hang your fur cap by the door and salute the ikon
that with ever-burning lamp looks down over the parlor-car. Now you can
sit on the broad sofa set along the wall, or doze in the corner-rocker
under the bookcase, or sit tête-à-tête in armchairs over a miniature
table. Ladies here, as well as men, are chatting, reading, and smoking,
for this combination parlor, _fumoir_, and dining-room is for all,
not a resort to which the masculine element shamefacedly steals for
unshared indulgences.
“_Dva stakan chai, pajolst_” (two glasses of tea, please), your friend
says to the aproned _chelaviek_, a Tatar from Kazan.
“_Stakan vodka_,” you add; for you are willing to contribute twenty
kopecks to the government revenues if this beverage will help out the
memoirs of your friend, the convict.
“_Say chass_,” replies the waiter, which means, literally, “this hour,”
figuratively, “at once,” actually, whenever he chances to recall that
your party wants a glass of tea and another of vodka. When at length
the refreshments have come, your companion gets gradually back to the
reminiscences.
“Were your comrades many on that march?”
“Twenty-six from my school in Odessa,” he says. He tells of the tumult
in the Polytechnic Academy, when he was a boy of sixteen studying
engineering; of the barricade which the students threw up; of the
soldiers sent against it; of an officer wounded with a stone, and
the sentence to the mines. He tells of the journey, day after day,
the miserable company trudging under the burning suns of summer and
shivering under the biting cold of winter, ill-fed and in rags. He
recalls how this friend and that friend sickened and died; how a
peasant-woman gave him a dried fish; how one of the criminals tried
to escape and was lashed with the _plet_ until he fainted beneath its
strokes.
“We were a sad procession. First came the Cossacks on their ponies,
with their carbines and sabres. Then the murderers for Sakhalin, and
the dangerous criminals in fetters; a few women next; then we, the
politicals; last, more soldiers marching behind. Far to the rear
came carts and wagons with the wives and families of the prisoners,
following their men into exile. Slowly we went, scarcely more than
fifteen versts a day, with a rest one day out of three, for the women.
In winter we camped in stations along the road.”
From the comfortable leather armchairs they seem infinitely distant
and dream-like, these tales from the dark ages of Siberia. The
speaker seems to have forgotten his auditor and to be talking to
himself, and soon he relapses into silence. He sits holding his glass
of lemon-garnished tea, like a resting giant with his shaggy beard
and mighty chest. The drag of the brakes is felt through the train.
“_Desiet minute stoit_” (ten minutes’ stop), somebody calls out.
Suddenly, with an effort, the man across the table rouses from his
reverie, and looks about the car, when the broad smile comes back and
he says earnestly:--
“You must not think of that as the true Siberia. It was all long
ago--thirty-five years. And you see I who became a _kayoshnik_,
a gold-seeker, have prospered, and work many mines. I am glad now
that they sent me to Siberia. And many others prosper who came with
the convicts. The old dark Siberia dies, but our new Siberia of the
railroad lives, and grows great.”
He rises resolutely and shakes your hand with a vise-like grip.
“_De svidania!_” (Till we meet again.)
You rise with the rest, draw on your fur cap and gloves, work into the
heavy fur-lined overcoat, and clamber down to the platform. A little
wooden station-house painted white is opposite the carriage door. It
has projecting eaves and quaint many-paned windows. In front of it is a
post with a large brazen bell. On the big signboard you can spell out
from the Russian letters “Zlatoust.” This is the summit station of the
pass that crosses the Urals. Around are standing stolid sheep-skinned
figures, bearded peasants just in from their sledges, which are ranked
outside the fence. Fur-capped mechanics, carrying wrenches and hammers,
move from car to car to tighten bolts and test wheels for the long
eastward pull. Uniformed station attendants are here and there, some
with files of bills of lading. As you walk down the platform among
the crowd, you come upon a soldier, duffle-coated and muffled in his
capote, standing stoically with fixed bayonet. Forty paces further
there is another, and beyond still another, all the length of the
platform, and far up the line. What a symbol of Russian rule are these
silent sentries! And what a mute tale is told in the necessity for a
guard at every railroad halting-place in the Empire!
You stroll along toward the engine. Huge and box-like are the big steel
cars, five of which compose the train. Two second-class wagons painted
in mustard yellow are rearmost, then come the first-class, painted
black, next the “wagon restoran” and the luggage-van, where the much
advertised and little used bath-room and gymnasium are located. The
engine is a big machine, but of low power, unable to make much speed;
and the high grades and the road-bed, poor in many places, additionally
limit progress. It is apparent why the train rarely moves at a rate
greater than twenty miles an hour.
At first you do not notice the cold. But now that you have walked for
a few minutes along the platform, it seems to gather itself for an
attack, as if it had a personality. You draw erect with tense muscles,
for the system sets itself instinctively on guard. The light breeze
that stirs begins to smart and sting like lashes across the face. The
hand drawn for a moment from the fleece-lined glove, stiffens into
numbed uselessness. As you march rapidly up and down the platform, an
involuntary shiver shakes you from head to foot. A fellow passenger,
remarking it, observes:--
“It is not cold to-day, in fact, quite warm. _Ochen jarko._”
You walk together to the big thermometer that hangs by the
station-door. It is marked with the Réaumur Scale, and your brain is
too torpid for multiplications. But the slightly built official, known
as a government engineer by green-bordered uniform and crossed hammers
on his cap, is inspecting the mercury also.
“Eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit,” he says. “Quite warm for
January. It is often thirty-five degrees below zero here in the Uralsk.”
It gets colder at the suggestion. The three starting-bells ring, and
everybody scrambles into the compartments.
The express rolls onward down the Urals. You stroll back to the warm
dining-room and idly watch the groups around. Across the way is an
elderly mild-looking officer, whose gold epaulettes, zig-zagged with
silver furrows, are the insignia of a major-general. He smokes endless
cigarettes in company with another officer lesser in degree, a major,
decorated with the Russo-Japanese service-medal, smart of carriage
and alert of look. By the window beyond is a young German, gazing
meditatively at the hills and the snow through the bottom of a glass
of Riga beer. A rather bright-mannered dame, with rings on her fingers
and long pendants in her ears, chats vivaciously in French with a
phlegmatic-looking personage in a tight-fitting blue coat which buttons
up to his throat like a fencer’s jacket. A quietly-dressed gentleman,
evidently in civil life, is reading one of the library copies of de
Maupassant.
Outside, cut and tunnel, hill, slope, and valley, green forest, white
drifted snow, and bare craggy rocks, the Urals glide past. The little
track-wardens’ stations beside the way snap back as if jerked by a
sudden hand, and the telegraph-poles catch up in endless monotony the
sagging wires.
The Tatar waiter goes from place to place, clearing off the ashes and
the glasses, and getting ready for dinner. There is a table-d’hôte
repast, the Russian _obeid_, a meal which starts with a fiery vodka
gulp any time after noon, and tails off in the falling shadows of the
winter sunset with tea and cigarettes. Or, if one wishes, he may press
the bell, labeled in the Græco-Slavonic lettering, “Buffet,” and dine à
la carte.
“Il vaut mieux essayer le repas Russe,” says the quiet reader of de
Maupassant, joining you.