HISTORY OF ASIA GENERAL SURVEY 97 



the boundaries of Russia to the east; the Russian advance to the 

 Baltic had been stopped by the victories of Stephen Bathory; the 

 East only was left open to their enterprise. 



In 1558 a certain Gregori Strogonov obtained from the Tsar the 

 cession of the wild lands on the Kama River. With some companions 

 he settled in that region, created colonies, and some of the hardy 

 fellows went as far as the Ural Mountains. An adventurous Cossack 

 of the Don, Ermak Timofeevitch, whose services had been secured by 

 Strogonov, crossed the Ural Mountains at the head of eight hundred 

 and fifty plucky men, and advanced as far as the Irtysh and Ob rivers, 

 on the way subduing the Tartar princes. Ermak was the real con- 

 queror of Western Siberia, but if he had the luck and the glory of 

 adding a new kingdom to the states of the prince who has been sur- 

 named the Terrible, to his immediate successors was due the founda- 

 tion of the first town in the territory snatched from the Tartars, for 

 Ermak was drowned in the Irtysh in 1584, and Tobolsk dates only 

 from 1587. The effort of the Russians was then directed to the north 

 of Siberia; they did not meet with any resistance until they reached 

 the Lena River; in 1632 they built the fort of Yakutsk on the banks 

 of this river, and pushed their explorations on to the sea of Okhotsk. 

 In 1636 tidings of the Amoor River were for the first time heard 

 from Cossacks of Tomsk, who had made raids to the south. 



Vasili Poyarkov (1643-46) is the first Russian who navigated the 

 Amoor from its junction with the Zeia to its mouth. In 1643-51 , 

 Khabarov led an expedition in the course of which he built on the 

 banks of the river several forts, Albasine among them. In 1654, 

 Stepanov for the first time ascended the Sungari, where he met 

 the Chinese, who compelled him to trace his way back to the Amoor. 

 In spite of all their exertions, after two sieges of Albasine by the 

 Chinese, the Russians were obliged on the 27th of August, 1689, 

 to sign at Nerchinsk a treaty by which they were driven out of the 

 basin of the Amoor. 



The Russians, bound to carry their efforts to the north, subdued 

 Kamchatka. What is perhaps most remarkable in the history of 

 the relations of the two great Asiatic empires is the tenacity of the 

 Muscovite grappling with the cunning of the Chinese, and the com- 

 parison between the starting-point of these relations, the Russia 

 of Michael and Alexis and the China of K'ang-hi, and their culminat- 

 ing-point in 1860, when these very nations shall have passed, one 

 through the iron hands of Peter the Great and become the Russia 

 of Alexander II, and the other under the backward government of 

 Kia-K'ing and Tao-kwang and become the China of their feeble suc- 

 cessor Hien-Fung. Only on the 18th of May, 1854, did the Governor- 

 General Muraviev navigate again the waters of the Amoor River; on 

 the 16th of May, 1858, he signed at Aigun a treaty which made the 



