The Siberian Tea Road

The Great Siberian Tea Road, a historic and legendary route that once connected China and Siberia with European Russia, was one of the world’s longest trade arteries. It began at the northernmost gate of the Great Wall of China and stretched nearly 4,000 miles north to Lake Baikal and west across Siberia before continuing on to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Tea has not always been a central feature of Russian culture. In fact, it wasn’t until the reign of Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov (1613-1645) that Russia’s eastward expansion eventually led to the introduction of chai (the Russian word for tea that stems from the Chinese chá). But Russia’s first encounter with tea was not auspicious.

When the tsar’s ambassador, Vasily Starkov, was sent on a mission from Moscow to meet with the Altyn Khan of Khalkha – who ruled what is now northwestern Mongolia – he described a mysterious drink that was served, “consisting of leaves. I know not whether from tree or herb.”

Upon departing, Starkov was given 150 pounds of the leaves, intended for the tsar. But having no desire to haul heavy trunks filled with dried vegetation thousands of versts back to Moscow, the ambassador graciously declined. He requested instead that the khan offer the equivalent in sables. This was refused, so Starkov had no choice but to return, in 1638, with the tea. The account claims that when the bitter herb was presented to the tsar – who had never before laid eyes on the substance – he tried to chew it.

Thereafter, Chinese tea remained scarce and was mainly used for medicinal purposes; it was prescribed several decades later for Tsar Alexei’s[1] stomach ailments. It would be another hundred years before tea became plentiful enough and prices low enough so that middle and lower class Russians would embrace it.

In the meantime, northeastern tribes in Asia had expanded their control south into Chinese lands. By 1683, the Manchu, today known as the Qing Empire, presided over the largest realm that China had ever known, including all of present-day China and parts of Central Asia and Mongolia.

On the Russian side of the border, well-armed Cossacks, having conquered local Buryat tribes in the Baikal region, ventured south across the Amur River and into Chinese territory. In response, the Kangxi Emperor sent a letter (in Latin) to the Moscow Court, demanding that Russian traders leave the Amur basin. The Russian government – knowing that it was impossible to defend an area so far east – decided it was in their best interest to establish peaceful trade opportunities. In January 1686, Count Fyodor Golovin, along with 500 streltsy guardsmen, set out from Moscow on the 2600-mile journey across Siberia. The trip was long and arduous, and the group did not reach Lake Baikal until nearly two years later.

After multiple negotiations, Golovin agreed to meet with Chinese emissaries in the small settlement of Nerchinsk, located another 400 miles east of Baikal. It was here that Russia signed its first trade agreement with China – the Treaty of Nerchinsk – in August, 1689. Golovin accepted the loss of the entire Amur valley in exchange for access to Chinese trade markets. Within a year, construction began on the Great Siberian Trakt.[2]

It cannot be imagined how difficult and dangerous it was to slowly carve out this monumental route. To lay a road across thousands of miles of inhospitable and desolate taiga forest – filled with swamps, peat bogs, permafrost ice fields, and mighty rivers – took nearly a century of toil by serfs and convict laborers. In the warmer months, there was so much mud and dust, along with swarms of mosquitoes, that any explorer or itinerant trader preferred to journey in the extreme cold and dark days of winter, when the ground was covered in ice and snow. In the early years of the trakt, it could take up to 18 months to complete the transcontinental crossing. As one Russian proverb expressed it, in Siberia, “God is high above and the tsar far away” (до Бога высоко, до царя далеко). A traveler along the trakt could not have felt more remote and cut off from the rest of the world.

Over the next two centuries, merchants from all across China descended with their wares upon Kalgan (today’s Zhangjiakou, 100 miles northwest of Beijing in Hebei Province). Here, at the northernmost gate of the Great Wall of China, Kalgan (literally “Gate Town”) was the terminus of all principal caravans that set out across what is now Mongolia for Siberia. Hardy camels were the preferred mode of transport; a camel walks as fast as a packhorse, but can carry three times the weight – over 400 pounds.

At its zenith, this bustling center contained hundreds of commercial firms and employed thousands of men who utilized tens of thousands of camels, ox wagons and horses. These caravans transported silk and cotton, ginseng, ginger and rhubarb (valued for medicinal purposes), along with vast quantities of tea.

The popular Russian Caravan tea is named after the large convoys that once made this long overland journey. The Russians believed that the campfires that burned over the many nights along the way imbued the tea with a special smoky taste.

Originally, tea in Russia was known as the “Chinese herb.” Two kinds of tea were imported from China: brick tea, and later the loose baykhovy – a word derived from the Chinese slang for loose tea, bai hoa (“white eyelash”), which was primarily made of tips and buds. The bricks were comprised of both the better and coarser leaves, as well as twigs from the shrub (and often binding agents such as flour and manure). The blend was steamed, weighed, and packed into molds, which were then compressed and left to dry. The average rectangular block weighed about 10 kilos or 22 pounds, but was divided into smaller units when repacked on camels. In order to better protect the exposed bricks from the elements during the long trek, they were tightly sewn up in animal hides.

Most of the early Sibiryaki – Russians who left European Russia for Siberia – made their living trading furs. By the end of the 1600s, the tsar’s fur tribute amounted to well over 100,000 pelts a year, which included sable, fox and sea otter – known as Kamchatka beaver. Later, the fur trade expanded into the North Pacific and its outlying islands. This soft gold was a significant source for the Russian treasury, helping to finance Peter the Great’s costly campaign to modernize Russia and build the new capital of St. Petersburg. Since Siberia was much closer to China than Europe, most of the furs were traded along the Chinese border.

Today, sparsely-populated Mongolia is wedged between China and Russia. Near the Russo-Mongolian border, Mongolians typically live in a round, wooden lattice-framed structure, usually covered by layers of fabric or felt, known as a ger (across the border in Russia it is called a yurt). Gers are easily transportable. A traditional nomadic saying has it: “Happy is one who has guests in the ger; merry is the home boasting a tethering rail full of visitors’ horses.” The door of a ger is never locked, and a traveler is always welcomed with hot tea and a bowl of mare’s-milk yogurt. At night, camping here under the stars two hundred years ago, caravan members might have listened to khoomei throat or overtone singing. Men skilled in this form of vocalizing are able to sing two notes simultaneously, producing a fascinating, eerie sound.

During the decades following the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, the Manchu frequently and unpredictably closed their doors to foreign traders. At one point, Peter I became so exasperated that, in 1706, he made it illegal for Russian merchants to trade in Beijing (Peking). Only in the final year of Peter’s reign did a new Chinese Emperor convince the tsar to negotiate a new trade agreement.

Tsar Peter selected Count Savva Lukich Vladislavich-Raguzinsky, a merchant from Herzegovina in Russian service, to conduct negotiations with representatives of the Qing Emperor. Count Raguzinsky departed St. Petersburg in 1725 with over 1500 soldiers and other personnel in tow, including cartographers – adequate maps of Siberia were still lacking. With only a primitive trakt in place, it took the entourage nearly a year to reach Lake Baikal. Chinese ambassadors agreed to discuss trade near the border, in the Kyakhta Valley, another several hundred miles further south.

An agreement was finally reached and signed, and the Treaty of Kyakhta was ratified in 1728, opening a larger market for Chinese tea and Russian furs than ever before. Under the treaty, a new border was drawn between the two countries; border markers were inscribed in Manchu, Chinese, Russian and Latin. In addition, two main trading centers were to be established, one on each side of the border.

On the Russian side, Raguzinsky selected a spot on the Kyakhta River to build the New Trinity Fort, and construction of the settlement of Troitskosavsk (“savsk” added in honor of Count Savva) soon followed. Despite its unbelievably desolate location, full of sand, dust and battering winds, this remote colony, which came to be known as Kyakhta (Кяхта), quickly grew and prospered into a city so unbelievably wealthy and grand that it was known as far away as Paris and London as the “Sandy Venice.”

The Chinese town of Maimachen (“Buy-Sell City”) was located only a few hundred yards south across the border. (The Mongolian town of Altanbulag has taken its place.) Women were not allowed to live in Maimachen, and the Chinese, fearing the influx of Western culture, discouraged merchants from permanently settling here. But the soon-to-be affluent town grew into an astonishing example of elegance, and later became renowned for its sumptuous and extravagant dinners, consisting of up to 60 dishes served at a time.

The American explorer, George Kennan, who visited the town in the late 1880s, humorously observed: “If Chinese dine in this way every day, I wonder that the race has not long since become extinct. One such dinner, eaten late in the fall, would enable a man, I should think, if he survived it, to go into a cave like a bear and hibernate until the next spring.” Of course, steaming cups of tea were generously served throughout the lengthy banquets.

In the early years, much of the trade was conducted on a barter basis; the highly valued bricks of tea were often used as currency in Siberia (even into the 1930s). Russians exchanged the golden fleece of sable, mink, fox and even squirrel and rabbit for Chinese merchandise; every year millions of animal pelts traded hands. In order to communicate, the two towns cleverly developed their own dialect, Kyakhta Russian-Chinese pidgin. Meanwhile, each side not only smuggled goods to avoid customs fees and taxes, but also attempted to ingeniously out-swindle the other. For example, Russians secretly sewed pieces of lead into animal hides, as did the Chinese into bolts of cloth, in both cases to add to the weight and cost of their wares. Legend has it that Chinese dealers once stitched pigskins around wooden blocks and tried to sell them as hams.

Tea was first bought by Kyakhta merchants in the form of hard bricks, which Siberians also infused with mutton fat and salt. Towards the end of the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), Russia was importing nearly three million pounds of tea annually, along with a million yards of cotton cloth and silk. As the higher-quality loose tea became more popular with the nobility, demand for it surpassed the cheaper bricks, which were reserved mostly for the lower classes.

The growing town flourished; by the mid-nineteenth century, nearly two thirds of China’s tea exports passed through Kyakhta’s gates and into the torgoviye ryadi (trading rows), where as many as 5,000 cases of tea were unloaded daily, eventually accounting for up to 90 percent of all goods imported into Siberia. Tea was so popular that resourceful Chinese merchants began trading all things connected to it, such as cups, teapots and porcelain.

Russian merchants, who had become extravagantly wealthy overnight, spent vast amounts of money on their magnificent mansions and estates. To show off their cultural sophistication and fortunes, they hired European artists and ordered furniture and the latest fashions from St. Petersburg and Paris. Many brightly-painted wooden houses still line the back passages of Kyakhta, but only a handful of the large merchant homes still stand; one of these belonged to the nineteenth-century philanthropist, Alexei Lushnikov, whom George Kennan visited before setting off for Maimachen.

Thanks to Kyakhta’s local tea tax, public funds were used to construct a paved boulevard, hospital, orphanage, and numerous schools. The town even had its own newspaper, the Kyakhta Blade. The merchant class also funded splendid places of worship, designed in the Neoclassical style of the times. The Resurrection Cathedral, built by Russian and Italian architects, reportedly had doors made of silver and a golden iconostasis. Along with the Holy Trinity Cathedral (its dome shaped in the form of a globe), this once obscure border town boasted many of the most impressive churches in all of Siberia.

During the Soviet era, Kyakhta became a special military town, completely closed to foreigners and most Russian citizens. Trinity Cathedral and its four-tiered bell-tower, gutted by fire in the 1960s, today lies in ruins, only a shell of its former self. The Resurrection Church, which stands near the border, is closed and under restoration. Kyakhta is today merely a sleepy frontier town with a population of less than 20,000.

Ivolginsky Monastery

North of Kyakhta, beyond miles and miles of rolling green hills, lies Ulan Ude, capital of the Republic of Buryatia. Situated at the confluence of the Selenga and Uda rivers, this Cossack garrison, built in 1666, was originally known as Udinsk. Ulan Ude’s main claim to fame is a statue of Lenin’s head – the world’s largest head of the first Soviet leader. Also of interest are the old quarter’s log cabins, faded nineteenth-century merchant homes, and remnants of bygone trading arcades.

The Buryats are related by language and culture to the Khalkha Mongols, those who made the initial gift of tea to the Russian tsar. By tradition, they are a nomadic, pastoral people who profess a combination of Buddhist and shamanic beliefs.

As tea caravans made their way through Buryatia, they passed numerous monasteries and hillside shrines, and some travelers stopped to rest and pray. Today, two of the main remaining monasteries are Ivolginsky, whose perimeter is lined with large Tibetan-style golden prayer wheels, and Atsagat Datsun, which Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, the future Nicholas II, visited in 1891, as he journeyed west along the Bolshoi Trakt from Vladivostok on a visit to the empire’s Siberian regions.

In the Buryat Village of Arbidzhil, locals offer a generous meal of buuz meat dumplings, pinched at the top and boiled, and tea served in small porcelain cups. Those offering the tea extend the cup in their right hand, while supporting their right elbow with their left hand. Apparently this custom evolved as a way to prove one was not concealing a weapon.

In nearby Tarbagalay, a tight-knit community of Old Believers (descendants of schismatics from the Orthodox Church caused by reforms instituted in 1652) – or Semeiskiye (“Family People”) as they call themselves – still exist much as they did centuries ago. The women dress in long, brightly-colored folk costumes, adorned with kichka headdresses and large, amber bead necklaces passed down over many generations. Their local museum contains an unusual collection of eighteenth-century household items, including many antique samovars that date to the Golden Age of the Tea Road.

It is hard to imagine Russian tea without the samovar, adapted in the 1770s from Mongol kettle designs.[3] Stemming from the Russian words sam (“self”) and varit (“to boil”), samovars were made from copper, silver, brass and porcelain, though one designed from gold (shaped like a rooster) won a grand prize at the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna.

The Russian tradition was to serve hot tea in the afternoon or after supper. After the meal was cleared, the samovar was placed in the center of the table, and family and friends gathered round. Highly concentrated tea – zavarka – was brewed in a teapot, poured into a teacup, and then diluted with hot water from the samovar to one’s taste. Typically, sugar was not dissolved in one’s tea. Instead, the tea was sipped through a cube of sugar held between the teeth. It was also customary to pour steaming tea directly from one’s cup into a saucer, from which cooler mouthfuls could be sipped.

By the nineteenth century, Russian artists and writers were equating tea with the national Russian identity, invoking the samovar as a symbol of Russian hospitality. Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy all wrote of the many rituals and traditions surrounding the beloved chayepitye – tea drinking.

Day faded; on the table, glowing,

the samovar of evening boiled,

and warmed the Chinese teapot; flowing

beneath it, vapor wreathed and coiled.

Already Olga’s hand was gripping

the urn of perfumed tea, and tipping

into the cups its darkling stream –

meanwhile a hall boy handed cream.

Evgeny Onegin, Alexander Pushkin[5]

The glistening shores of Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and largest freshwater lake, lie only a short distance west of Ulan Ude. Baikal is said to originate from the Buryat Baigal-Dalai (“Natural Sea”), and the Chinese referred to Baikal as Pe Hai (“Northern Ocean”). It is a five-hour boat ride across the lake (Baikal is nearly 400 miles long and 50 miles wide), to the quaint town of Listvyanka, and several more hours by car to Irkutsk, the “Pearl of Siberia.”

Founded in 1661 on the shores of the Angara River, Irkutsk was first used as a base for collecting the tsar’s fur tribute from local Buryats. By the mid-eighteenth century, Irkutsk had grown to become the main distribution center for all merchandise flowing across Eurasia. For six weeks each year, from mid-November through December, as many as 10,000 sledges descended on the great Irkutsk Fair, where they were loaded up to carry the freight west. Tea from Beijing, traversing across the Great Siberian Route, eventually ended up on sale in the shops and salons of New York City.

“I am not dried up from tea drinking, my dear,

but from the insults of the world.”

Alexander Ostrovsky, A Protégée of the Mistress (1859)

One English traveler visiting Irkutsk in the 1880s marveled at “the constant succession of carts in long strings, the crowds of laborers, the knots of earnest-looking traders with long beards… and, along the wharves, enormous pyramids of chests of tea, called tsybiki, are heaped upon the ground, covered only with matting made from the inner bark of the birch tree… Here may be seen many kinds of tea, like yellow and brick, the former of a delicious fragrance and very pale, but injurious to the nerves if taken very frequently.”

As one of Siberia’s most prosperous towns, Irkutsk had the region’s first public library and one of the first smallpox vaccination centers anywhere in the world (part of a program initiated by Catherine the Great). Merchants with so much wealth to flaunt helped fashion their city into a showcase of culture, education and art. Interestingly, since Siberia was also a land to which more than a million men and woman had been sent to endure years of penal servitude or banishment, a liberal social ethos developed, whereby one’s past was accepted, not judged – in sharp contrast with Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Some of the most famous nineteenth century Siberian exiles were the Decembrists, whose ill-fated 1825 revolt sought an end to autocracy. The devoted Maria Volkonskaya followed her convicted husband Sergei east along the trakt to Siberia, where their exile lasted 30 years.[5] Irkutsk’s Volkonsky Manor Museum, where the couple lived from 1847 to 1856, offers a fascinating view into these exiles’ lives in the Siberian capital. Maria’s patronage included work with hospitals and primary schools, and her influence helped establish the region’s first theater.

Another famous exile, arrested in 1849 for criticizing the government, Fyodor Dostoyevsky served a decade of combined hard labor and military service in Siberia. In his book on his difficult years in exile, Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky proclaims: “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”

Products traversing the Tea Route continued their path west from Irkutsk, through towns such as Tomsk, Tobolsk, Yekaterinburg, and Nizhny Novgorod before arriving in Moscow and St. Petersburg (where the first public Tea Room opened on August 28, 1882). In Moscow’s central Merchant’s Hall, traders would sit for hours discussing dealings over tea, dispensed from enormous two-gallon samovars.

Before the arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railway, it took up to five months in winter (and double that in warmer months) for goods to travel the 2000 miles from Irkutsk to Nizhny Novgorod. This city, located at the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, was home to one of the largest annual fairs in Imperial Russia (it actually ran until 1929). Each July, the lively Makaryev Fair attracted thousands of visitors, and foreign merchants from as far away as Iran and India. Tea was the backbone of business at this and all Russian trade events, where even the merchants were nicknamed chainiki (“teapots”).

The first cup moistens my lips and throat.

The second shatters my loneliness.

The third causes the wrongs of life to fade gently from my recollection.

The fourth purifies my soul.

The fifth lifts me to the realms of the immortals.

Lo Tung, Tang Dynasty Poet

In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal sounded the death knell for the Great Tea Road. The canal shortened considerably the sea route from China to Europe and Western Russia, slashing transportation costs by up to ninety percent. The final blow was the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway several decades later. When it was fully completed in 1916, a tea shipment that used to take months now took just over a week. In 1907, Luigi Barzina passed through Kyakhta during the Beijing to Paris automobile race. “By now,” he wrote, “all the riches here have dried up.”

Revolution and Civil War finished the job. In 1921, there was intense fighting in the border regions, and Maimachen was burned to the ground. After thriving for over two centuries, the era of the commerce and caravan trade along the Great Siberian Tea Road came to an end.

Yet the legacy of tea remains. Today, Russia is the world’s largest tea importer,[6] and over 80 percent of Russians drink tea daily. When friends visit, hosts invite them to a cup of tea. In traditional fashion, a steaming samovar may stand in the center of the table, surrounded by a porcelain tea set – perhaps decorated with the popular, blue Gzhel-style designs, and plates filled with blini pancakes, cakes or cookies, and several kinds of jams, honey, sliced lemon and sugar.

Truly, as Pushkin exclaimed, “ecstasy is a glassful of tea.” RL

Notes:

1. Father to Peter the Great.

2.In 1858, the Treaty of Aigun reversed the Treaty of Nerchinsk and granted lands north of the Amur River (over 260,000 square miles) to the Russian Empire. Lands east of the Ussuri and lower Amur were acquired by Russia two years later through the Convention of Peking. Today, the Amur River, flowing east over 2700 miles, marks the border between the Russian Far East and northeastern China (Manchuria).

3.The first samovars were made in Russia by the Lisitsyn brothers, who in 1778 registered the country’s first samovar factory in Tula, long a center of Russian metalworking.

4. Chapter 3, XXXVII. Translation by Charles H. Johnston

5.The book, The Princess of Siberia, by Christine Sutherland, provides an excellent account of the Volkonsky family’s life.
bit.ly/siberianprincess

6. Tea is also grown in Russia, in a few plantations in the south, near Sochi.