Chapter I: Part 1

THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA

THE RUSSIAN ROAD
TO CHINA

BY

LINDON BATES, JR.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

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.

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.

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.

He is duly thanked for the advice, and we beckon to the aproned waiter. At once the latter passes the countersign kitchenward to set the meal in motion, and puts before us the little liqueur-glasses and the bottle of vodka. While we still gasp and blink over this, he has gotten the cold _zakuska_ of black rye-bread and butter, _sardinka_, salty _beluga_, and cold ham, and has started us on the first course. Then comes in, after the omni-inclusive _zakuska_, a big pot of cabbage-soup which we are to season with a swimming spoonful of thick sour cream. The chunky pieces of half-boiled meat floating in it are left high and dry by the consumption of the liquid. The meat becomes the third course, which we garnish with mustard and taste.

“Voyons!” the Frenchman observes. “Of the Russian cuisine and its method of preparing certain food-substances one may not approve. Frankly it calls for the sauce of a prodigious appetite. But contemplating the _obeid_ as an institution so evolved as to fit into the general scheme of life, it finds merit. The Russian meal is a guide to Russian character.”

“What signifies this mélange of raw fish, eggs, and great slices of flesh, and mush of cabbage-soup?”

“Not that the Russian has no taste. It is that he sacrifices his finer susceptibilities to his love of freedom. A regular hour for meals would seem to him a sacrifice of his leisure and convenience to that of the cook. The guiding principle of the national cuisine is that all dishes must be capable of being served at any time that the eater feels disposed.”

This is a problem to put to any kitchen, we allow. Napoleon’s chef met it by relays of roasting chickens. But one cannot keep half a dozen fowl going for each household of the one hundred and forty million inhabitants of Russia. Thus sturgeon is provided, and sterlet, parboiled so that it tastes like blotting-paper; and the filet that is called “biftek,” and the oil-sodden “Hamburger,” that is dubbed “filet.” These can be started at nine in the morning, and be removed at any time between that hour and nine at night, without any appreciable change in taste or texture. The cook of the restaurant, like his brethren of the Empire, has laid his professional conscience sacrificially upon the national altar of unfettered meals. If the _obeid_ is not a triumph in culinary art, it is at least a signal example of domestic generalship.

We have advanced without a hitch to roast partridge, with sugared cranberries, which our friend washes down with good red wine from the Imperial Crimean estates. We get through a hard German-like apple-tart, and reach the last item of cheese.

When the mighty meal is over, we order tea, light cigarettes, and lean back in the armchairs to chat and note how our neighbors are getting through the time.

At the far end of the room a Russian has joined the French lady and her escort. They are celebrating some occasion that requires heaping bumpers of champagne. The babble of their conversation is in the air. It seems to refer to the comparative appreciation of histrionic talent in Rouen and Vladivostok!

Somebody is being treated to a dressing-down in the latest Parisian argot. “Ces sont des betteraves là-bas!” one hears scornfully above the murmurs.

Across the way some Germans are engaged with beer-schooners. One of them gets excited and brings his fist down upon the table. “Arbeit in Sibirien nimmer geendet ist; they always want more advice about their gas-plants.”

In the lull that follows the explosion, a gentle English voice floats past from the seat behind us. “And so I told him that the station had nearly enough funds, but we needed workers, more workers.” It is the English medical missionary on his way to Shanta-fu, discussing China with the American mining-engineer, bound for Nerchinsk.

The piano, under the corner ikon with its ever-burning lamp, tinkles out suddenly, and a man’s voice starts up--

You can hear the girls declare,
He must be a millionaire.

He misses a note every now and then, which does not embarrass him in the least. Caroling gayly to his own accompaniment, he forges ahead. The crowd in the armchairs around the room, consuming weak tea or strong beer, and smoking, all join with an untroubled accord and versatile accents, French, English, and Russian, in the blaring chorus, “The man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”

The train rocks faster on the falling grade; little by little the mountains drop away; gradually the mighty forests become dwarfed into scattered clumps of straggly birches, and the great trees dwindle into bushes; lower and still lower fall the hills, until all is flat. As far as the eye can see are the snow-covered wastes, treeless, houseless, lifeless. The lowest foothills of the Urals have been passed. It is the beginning of the great steppes.

Slowly the daylight wanes. The gray darkness deepens steadily; it seems to gather in over the gliding snow, and the peculiar gloom of a Siberian winter’s night closes down. At each track-guard’s post flash with vivid suddenness the little twinkling lanterns of the wardens of the road. Involuntarily conversation becomes less animated and voices are lowered; the spell of the sombreness is over all.

Soon the electric lamps are lighted, and from brazen ikon and sparkling glasses flash reflections of their glitter. Curtains are drawn, which shut out the enshrouding blackness. The piano begins tinkling again; the waiters come and go with tea and liqueurs; the babble of conversation rises; and the idle laughter is heard anew. Darkness may be ahead, behind, and beside, but within there is light--enjoy it.