Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689): China and Russia Set a Border

The Treaty of Nerchinsk was the first treaty between Qing China and Russia, concluded on 27 August 1689 (by the Julian calendar then used in Russia) at the Siberian fort of Nerchinsk. Ending decades of fighting in the Amur River valley, it fixed a border between the two expanding empires, opened regulated trade and kept the peace on their long frontier for more than 150 years.

Background: two empires meet on the Amur

In the seventeenth century Russian fur traders, Cossacks and officials pushed rapidly across Siberia, following the path opened by the conquest of Siberia under Yermak. By the 1640s they had reached the Pacific coast and the basin of the Amur River, a fertile region far richer in grain than the frozen north.

The Amur valley, however, lay on the edge of the Manchu homeland. The Manchus had conquered China in 1644 and founded the Qing dynasty, and they regarded the peoples of the Amur, such as the Daurs and Evenks, as their tributaries. The expeditions of Vasily Poyarkov (1643–1646) and Yerofei Khabarov (1649–1653) brought violence and demands for tribute in furs, and local peoples appealed to the Qing for protection.

Fighting followed in the 1650s. Qing forces defeated the Cossack leader Onufriy Stepanov in 1658, and for a time the Russians withdrew. They soon returned, founding or rebuilding forts at Nerchinsk on the Shilka River and at Albazin on the upper Amur, which became the centre of Russian settlement in the region.

The sieges of Albazin

After crushing the Revolt of the Three Feudatories in southern China in 1681, the Kangxi Emperor turned to the north. He built up bases, granaries and a river fleet in Manchuria and sent repeated warnings to the Russians to leave the Amur.

In June 1685 a Qing army of several thousand men with artillery besieged Albazin, which was held by a few hundred defenders under the voivode Alexei Tolbuzin. The fort surrendered, its garrison was allowed to leave, and the Qing burned it. Once the Qing troops had gone, however, Tolbuzin returned and rebuilt Albazin with stronger earth walls.

A second siege began in July 1686. Tolbuzin was killed early on, and the defence was led by Afanasy Beiton, a soldier of German origin in Russian service. Hunger and scurvy reduced the garrison to a few dozen men, but the fort held out. When Kangxi learned that a Russian embassy was on its way to negotiate, he lifted the siege in 1687.

Negotiations at Nerchinsk

The Russian government, then ruled by the regent Sophia on behalf of the young co-tsars Ivan V and Peter I, sent the nobleman Fyodor Alexeyevich Golovin as its envoy. The Qing delegation was led by the senior Manchu official Songgotu and by Tong Guogang, the emperor’s maternal uncle. The talks were first meant to take place at Selenginsk, but war in Mongolia moved them to Nerchinsk.

Neither side spoke the other’s language, so the negotiations took place mainly in Latin. Kangxi sent two Jesuit missionaries from his court, the Frenchman Jean-François Gerbillon and the Portuguese Tomás Pereira, as interpreters and advisers. The Jesuits had served at the Qing court since the mission of Matteo Ricci under the Ming. On the Russian side Andrei Belobotsky, a Pole, acted as Latin interpreter. Both Jesuits kept diaries that remain key sources.

The Qing envoys arrived in August 1689 with a large escort and a river fleet that heavily outnumbered Golovin’s men. Formal talks opened later that month and almost broke down several times. The Russians first proposed the Amur itself as the border; the Qing claimed land as far west as Lake Baikal. The Jesuits shuttled between the camps, and the Qing show of force, together with local Buryat and other peoples turning against Russia, pushed Golovin towards compromise.

Terms of the treaty

The treaty was agreed and sealed on 27 August 1689 (6 September in the Gregorian calendar). Its main terms were:

• Border. The frontier followed the Gorbitsa and Argun rivers and then the line of the Stanovoy range (the “stone mountains”) to the sea. Land to the south, including the whole Amur basin, went to the Qing; land to the north went to Russia. The area between the Stanovoy and the Uda River was left undecided.
• Albazin. Russia agreed to destroy the fort and withdraw its settlers.
• Fugitives. Neither side would harbour people fleeing across the border after the treaty, and existing subjects stayed where they were.
• Trade. Subjects of both states with proper passports could cross the border and trade freely.
• Markers. Boundary stones were to be set up with inscriptions in several languages, including Latin, Russian, Manchu, Chinese and Mongolian.

The authoritative text was the Latin one, signed by both delegations. Russian and Manchu versions also existed and differed in some details, which later caused disputes.

Consequences

For the Qing, Nerchinsk secured the Manchu homeland and freed the empire to deal with its most dangerous rival, the Dzungar ruler Galdan, who had invaded the Khalkha Mongols in 1688. Kangxi defeated Galdan at Jao Modo in 1696, and the long Qing struggle with the Dzungars ended only with the conquest of the Dzungar Khanate in the 1750s.

For Russia, the loss of the Amur was a setback, but the trade clause was valuable. Russian state caravans soon travelled to Beijing, exchanging Siberian furs for silk, cotton, tea and silver. Golovin went on to become one of Peter the Great’s leading ministers and a leader of his Grand Embassy to western Europe in 1697–1698.

The treaty was also unusual for Qing diplomacy. China normally dealt with foreign states through the tribute system, which treated them as inferiors. At Nerchinsk the two sides negotiated as equals and produced a written agreement in a European language, a precedent that was rarely repeated before the nineteenth century.

Legacy

The Treaty of Kyakhta of 1727 extended the settlement westward, fixing the border between Russia and Qing-ruled Mongolia and regulating trade at Kyakhta. The Nerchinsk line in the east lasted until the mid-nineteenth century, when a weakened Qing China signed the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860). These gave Russia the left bank of the Amur and the coast east of the Ussuri, where Vladivostok was founded.

Chinese historians later called these “unequal treaties” and contrasted them with Nerchinsk, which they regarded as a fair agreement between equals. The border question was not fully settled until agreements between China and Russia in 1991 and 2004.

Timeline

• 1643–1653: Expeditions of Poyarkov and Khabarov bring Russians to the Amur.
• 1658: Qing forces defeat Onufriy Stepanov’s Cossacks on the Amur.
• 1685, June: First Qing siege of Albazin; the fort surrenders and is burned.
• 1686, July: Second siege of the rebuilt Albazin begins.
• 1687: Kangxi lifts the siege as a Russian embassy approaches.
• 1689, August: The Qing delegation arrives and talks open at Nerchinsk.
• 1689, 27 August (Julian): The treaty is concluded.
• 1727: The Treaty of Kyakhta fixes the Mongolian section of the border.
• 1858–1860: The treaties of Aigun and Peking revise the border in Russia’s favour.

Why it matters

The Treaty of Nerchinsk was China’s first treaty with a European power and the foundation of relations between two of the largest states in the world. It showed that the Qing could negotiate as an equal when it suited them, gave Jesuit missionaries an unexpected role in diplomacy, and set a frontier whose later revision still shapes the map of north-east Asia.