Yury Golovkin - China Mission

China Mission

The Russian Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, had been preparing a mission to China for several years, partly in response to the growing Napoleonic hold over Europe, which left Russia with few possibilities for expansion. The resulting embassy was in some respects Russia’s answer to the embassy sent by Britain in 1793 under Earl Macartney, for the economic importance of Russian trade with China through the Russian-American Company was very significant. The Treaty of Kyakhta (1727) had permitted trade at the town of Kyakhta on the Russian-Chinese border (now the Russian-Mongolian border), roughly half-way between Irkutsk and Urga (present-day Ulan Bator). However, the growth of European trade with China on the Chinese coast in and around Canton was giving rise to the future of Russian trade with China and in February 1803 Count Nikolay Rumyantsev, the Minister of Commerce, proposed a full-scale assault on what he saw as the commercial isolation of East Asia. In the end there were three components to this strategy; the first was Golovkin's mission, which travelled overland across Siberia in the winter, the second was Nikolai Rezanov’s mission to Japan, and the third was Adam Johann von Krusenstern’s circumnavigation of the globe, the first achieved by a Russian ship. The pretext of the Golovkin mission was to inform the Chinese government of the accession of Tsar Alexander I, but the real objective was to secure permission for Russian ships to enter Canton, to negotiate for the opening of a Russian consulate in Beijing and to secure Chinese agreement to the despatch of a Russian mission to Tibet.

Early in January 1806 Golovkin and his cortège reached Urga (Ulan Bator) on their way to Beijing. In Urga, in bitterly cold weather, the entire company were invited to attend an open-air reception at which they were expected to perform the kowtow before a table on which stood a wooden tablet and three candles. Golovkin refused, declaring that he would be happy to prostrate himself before the emperor but could not do so before a piece of wood. With that, the prospects for the mission melted away, and Golovkin and his large train had to retrace their steps to Irkutsk and then St Petersburg.