Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
6 o'clock in the evening, not far from the Stanitsa Pokrovskaya. We ran upon a rock, stove a hole in the steamer, and are now undergoing repairs. We are aground on a sandbank and pumping out water. On the left is the Russian bank, on the right the Chinese. If I were back at home now I should have the right to boast: "Though I have not been in China I have seen China only twenty feet off."
Unluckily the steamer Vyestnik coming the other way with a crowd of passengers is approaching the stanitsa. The Vyestnik cannot go on either, and both steamers stay stock-still. There is a military band on the Vyestnik, consequently there has been a regular festival.
On the Chinese side there is a sentry post a small hut; sacks of flour are piled up on the bank, ragged Chinamen are dragging the sacks on barrows to the hut. And beyond is the dense, endless forest. Some schoolgirls are travelling with us from Irkutsk Russian faces, but not good-looking. POKROVSKAYA STANITSA, June 23, 1890. I have told you already we are aground on a sandbank.
On the right is the Chinese bank, on the left is the stanitsa, Pokrovskaya, with the Cossacks of the Amur; if one likes one can stay in Russia, if one likes one can go into China, there is nothing to hinder one. It is insufferably hot in the daytime, so that one has to put on a silk shirt. They give us dinner at twelve o'clock, supper at seven.
But what is stranger still is that the bottle of brandy Kuvshinnikov gave me has not been broken, and that the brandy is still in it, every drop of it. I have vowed not to uncork it except on the shore of the Pacific. I am sailing down the Shilka, which runs into the Amur at the Pokrovskaya Stanitsa. The river is not broader than the Psyol, it is even narrower.
As the Cossacks knew very little about land-surveying, and still less about land-registration, the precise boundary between two contiguous yurts as the communal land of a stanitsa was called was often a matter of uncertainty and a fruitful source of disputes. When the boundary was once determined, the following method of registering it was employed.
Thus the whole of the arable land, or at least the best part of it, became actually, if not legally, the private property of a few families, whilst the less energetic or less fortunate inhabitants of the stanitsa had only parcels of comparatively barren soil, or had no land whatever, and became mere agricultural labourers. After a time this injustice was remedied.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking