IN 1689 CHINA’S Qing Empire signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk (Treaty of Nipchu in Chinese) with the Tsarist Empire to fix the borders between the two states. Cossacks began crossing the Urals in 1581, especially those under the leader Yermak, who, with fewer than 1,000 Cossacks and mercenaries, gradually pushed eastward, colonizing regions inhabited by numerous Siberian nomadic peoples. Whereas the French had to cross the Mediterranean to Algeria to add colonies to their homelands, and the British entire oceans to North America and Nigeria, Russia merely had to surmount the Urals, the natural frontier to the territories beyond.
By the mid-seventeenth century the Cossacks had reached the Sea of Okhotsk. Soon the Russians in the East encountered the Han Chinese, who were incrementally expanding to the south, west and north. Both empires met up on foreign – that is, forcibly occupied – territory. The indigenous nomadic tribes were as powerless against the Tsarist forces as they were against the advancing troops and administrative structures of the Han Chinese, who initially wanted only tribute payments and occasional plunder, and considered their western frontiers as a kind of glacis. Still, the Treaty of Nerchinsk could only delay direct confrontation between China and Russia.
Since the 1840s the increasingly apparent feebleness of the Chinese, caused by domestic uprisings and the aggression of the Europeans along parts of the eastern coast, gave the Russians enough reason to resume their advance into regions claimed by the Chinese in the west. The lower reaches of the River Amur (Heilongjiang in Chinese) and Sakhalin Island were tempting prizes for the Russians. The Chinese forces, already engaged in the Second Opium War, were in no position to oppose Russia.
Under threat of war, in 18A8 the Chinese governor of the region of Heilongjiang signed the Russian-Chinese Treaty of Aigun. China was forced to accept huge territorial losses south of the Outer Hinggan Range and north of the Amur totalling more than 600,000 sq. km. Another region of 400,000 sq. km. east of the Wusuli River was placed under the ‘joint control’ of Russia and China. But the Russian invaders were half-satisfied only once they had taken control of the port the Chinese knew as Haishenwei. The goal of the Russian campaign was expressed in the name they gave to their new settlement: Vladivostok, or ‘rule in the east.’
Only two years later, in 1860, Russia took advantage of China’s vulnerability at the very moment that Anglo-French troops were advancing on Beijing. Threatening war, in the Treaty of Beijing the Russians forced the Chinese to cede full control of the huge ‘jointly controlled’ territories east of the Wusuli. Four years later, the Tsarists wanted more. In 1864 the Chinese government was forced to sign the Protocol of Chunguchak, which gave the Russians control of 440,000 more square km of previously Chinese-occupied territory south and east of Lake Balkhash. The preliminary conclusion of agreements between China and Russia was the Treaty of St Petersburg in 1881, which fixed the Amur and Ussuri rivers as the (by no means undisputed) border between the two great empires.