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Updated: May 17, 2025
In area Siberia is larger than the whole of Europe, but the population in this immense country is no greater than that of Greater London, i.e. about seven millions. Of these 60 per cent are Russians, 20 per cent Kirghizes, and the remainder is made up of Buriats, Yakuts, Tunguses, Manchus, Samoyeds, Ostiaks, Tatars, Chukchis, etc.
I ask his forgiveness. What glass there is here! what mirrors! Why am I not a millionaire! ... Next year let us all take a summer cottage in Venice. The air is full of the vibration of church bells: my dear Tunguses, let us all embrace Catholicism. If only you knew how lovely the organs are in the churches, what sculptures there are here, what Italian women on their knees with prayer-books!
But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea: an intriguing, ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same precious House of Tsin into the south.
Where you were careful to leave only the village blacksmith under his spreading chestnut-tree, or the innkeeper and his wife, for the sake of future travelers, let a century or two pass, and their descendants would be as the sea-sands for multitude; they would have founded a power, and be thundering down on an empire-smashing raid in Persia or China or India: Whether Huns, Sienpi, Jiujen, Turks, Tatars, Tunguses, Mongols, Manchus: God knows what all, but all destroyers.
They acknowledge also their subjection to the authority of the Tsar, and pay a regular annual tribute in furs. Nearly all the Siberian squirrelskins which reach the European market are bought by Russian traders from Wandering Tunguses around the Okhotsk Sea.
It is best estimated in the often-quoted words of Sir Henry Yule, whose edition of his book is one of the great works of English scholarship: He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom, which he had seen with his own eyes, the desert of Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongol steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been established at Cambaluc: the first Travellers to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders with all their eccentricities of manners and worship; of Tibet with its sordid devotees; of Burma with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns; of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin China, of Japan, the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that Museum of Beauty and Wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the Indian Archipelago, source of those aromatics then so highly prized and whose origin was so dark; of Java the Pearl of Islands; of Sumatra with its many kings, its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of Nicobar and Andaman; of Ceylon, the Isle of Gems, with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl and its powerful sun; the first in modern times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, to speak, though indeed dimly, of Zanzibar with its negroes and its ivory and of the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the Dark Ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities; and in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears and reindeer-riding Tunguses.
At the first Tunguse encampment we took a rest of twenty-four hours, and then, exchanging our dogs for reindeer, we bade good-bye to our Okhotsk drivers and, under the guidance of half a dozen bronze-faced Tunguses in spotted reindeerskin coats, pushed westward, through snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan.
They had travelled with the Wandering Tunguses through the densely timbered region between Nikolaievsk and Aian, ridden on the backs of reindeer over the rugged mountains of the Stanavoi range south of Okhotsk, and had finally met the Major at the latter place on the 22d. of February.
It is admitted that the Tchuktchi, on the eastern side of Behring's Straits, are, in all essential respects, Esquimaux; and I do not know that there is any satisfactory evidence to show that the Tunguses and Samoiedes do not essentially share the physical characters of the same people.
In the winter little snow fell there; but about Easter, which was that year in the latter end of April, there fell so great a snow, that the streets of Caracarum were so full, it had to be carried out in carts. The country on the Onon and Kerlon, in Daouria, or the land of the Tunguses. Forst. The Introduction of Rubruquis to Mangu-khan.
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