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Updated: June 11, 2025
I visited the market place every morning and saw curious groups of Russians, Bouriats, Mongols, and Chinese, engaged in that little commerce which makes the picturesque life of border towns. From 1727 to 1860 the Kiachta merchants enjoyed almost a monopoly of Chinese trade. Fortunes there are estimated at enormous figures, and one must be a four or five-millionaire to hold respectable rank.
Each kept open mansion in the forenoon and greeted all who came. There was a grand dinner in the afternoon, followed by a soiree dansame and a supper at a late hour. In a population like that of Kiachta there is a weekly average of at least three feast days for the entire year.
Some years ago it was proposed to open a complete water route between Tumen and Kiachta. The most eastern point that a steamer could attain in the valley of the Ob is on the river Ket. A canal about thirty miles long would connect the Ket with the Yenesei, whence it was proposed to follow the Angara, Lake Baikal, and the Selenga to Oust Kiachta.
Very dissatisfied with his progress, and stung one day by a remark of Grant's to the effect that he did not seem to speak Mongolian readily, Gilmour changed his plans. He resolved to go out upon the Plain, and persuade some Mongol to allow him to share his tent. On December 13, 1870, he left Kiachta and journeyed out into Mongolia to the first cluster of tents, named Olau Bourgass.
We did start, and after a prosperous journey arrived safely at Kiachta. 'There I found Grant and Hegemann, two Englishmen. I went to live in Grant's country house at Kudara. A difficulty arose about a teacher. I prayed about this, and strolling along came upon a tent in which was a man who was out of employment, and he being educated, I engaged him to be my teacher.
It may surprise London merchants who send Shanghai telegrams "via Kiachta" to learn that the wires terminate at Troitskosavsk, and do not reach Kiachta at all. The treaty which established trade between Russia and China at Kiachta provided that no one should reside there except merchants engaged in traffic.
I thank God for not permitting me to get a good teacher in Kiachta. Had I got a good teacher there, I would simply have remained there, and I am sure would not have learned half as much of the language as I did in the tent at Mongolia, would have got none of the insight I gained into the style of Mongolian life, and would not have got the introduction I had there to numerous Mongols.
At the first dinner I attended there were about forty persons at table, all of the sterner sex. According to the custom among Russian merchants the ladies were by themselves in another room. Between their apartment and ours there was a large room, corresponding, as I thought, to the neutral ground between Kiachta and Maimaichin.
No ladies were present, and the dinner, so far as its gastronomic features went, was much like a dinner at Irkutsk or Kiachta. At the second course my attention was called to an excellent fish peculiar to the Ob and Yenesei rivers. It is a species of salmon under the name of Nalma, and ascends from the Arctic Ocean.
Two months have I been in Peking; two weeks have I been in Kalgan; a month have I been in the desert; a month have I been in Kudara, a small Russian frontier military post; a month and a half have I been in Kiachta; two months have I been in Mongolia; and now two weeks have I been travelling in Russia.
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