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Paper abstract:

The Treaty of Kuldja (Ili) signed between Russia and Qing in 1851 started the official Russo-Qing trade in Xinjiang. The Russo-Qing trade in Xinjiang did not originate from the treaty, however. Signing the treaty was instead a way for the Qing to reassert its authority in Xinjiang's foreign commerce after decades of prevalent smuggling. This paper argues that the pre-1851 Russo-Qing unofficial trade in Xinjiang, which was legal for Russia but illegal for the Qing, had many characteristics of the post-treaty official trade, only with a smaller volume and fewer industrial products. The article supplements the scholarly discussion on the Russo-Kazakh-Qing tripartite relations by examining materials related to the pre-treaty era Russo-Qing trade in northern Xinjiang in Chinese and Russian sources. By comparing the narratives of Russian travelers and quantitative data from the Semipalatinsk custom registrar with the Qing palace memorials and chronicles, the research finds that the Qing officials in Xinjiang played the leading role in forging the discrepancy in the sources. While presenting themselves as an effective law-enforcing agency that fought against smuggling as shown in the memorials to the Qing emperors, the Qing officials from the lowest to the highest level were also active participants in smuggling as described in Russian sources. The research further highlights the role of Kazakh nomads and Central Asian merchants in this trade. Studying the development of the unofficial Russo-Qing trade in northern Xinjiang is conducive to tracing how the center of the Russo-Qing official trade gradually shifted from the Lake Baikal area (Kyakhta) in the 18th century to Xinjiang in the 19th century.