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Updated: May 27, 2025
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.
Outside the gateway we traversed the neutral ground, two hundred yards wide, driving toward a screen or short wall of brick work, on which a red globe was represented. We crossed a narrow ditch and, passing behind the screen, entered a gateway into Maimaichin, the most northern city of China. From 1727 to 1860 nearly all the trade between Russia and China was transacted at Kiachta and Maimaichin.
Few strangers come to Maimaichin, and the merchants have no inducement to keep articles rarely called for. I found they were determined to make me pay liberally. "How much?" I asked on picking up an article in one of their shops. My Russian companion whispered me not to buy, and after a few moments chaffering we departed.
Beside the Chinese dwellers in Maimaichin there are many Mongol natives of the surrounding region, most of them engaged in transporting merchandise to and from the city. I saw several trains of their little two-wheeled carts bringing tea from the southward or departing with Russian merchandise, and in one visit I encountered a drove of camels on the neutral ground.
It requires long practice to become expert in its use, but when once learned it is preferred by all merchants, whether native or foreign. I saw the same machine at Maimaichin, and learned that it was invented by the Chinese. The Celestials of San Francisco employ it in precisely the same manner as their countrymen in Mongolia.
We passed through a large yard and wound among so many courts and colonnades that I should have been sorely puzzled to find my way out alone. The public buildings of Maimaichin are not far from each other, but the routes between them are difficult for one whose ideas of streets were formed in American cities.
There is no theatre, concert-room, or newspaper office at Kiachta, and the citizens rely upon cards, wine, and gossip for amusement. They play much and win or lose large sums with perfect nonchalance. Visitors are rare, and the advent of a stranger of ordinary consequence is a great sensation. Kiachta and Maimaichin stand on the edge of a Mongolian steppe seven or eight miles wide.
The language spoken in the intercourse of Russians and Chinese at Kiachta is a mongrel tongue in which Russian predominates. It is a 'pigeon-Russian' exactly analagous to the 'pigeon English' of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and San Francisco. The Chinese at Maimaichin can reckon in Russian and understand the rudiments of that language very well.
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