History of Sinology/Chapter 16

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Chapter 16: Russia — From the Ecclesiastical Mission to Contemporary Chinese Studies

Introduction

Russia occupies a unique position in the history of world sinology. As the only European power sharing a land border with China, Russia developed its tradition of Chinese studies not through maritime exploration or colonial expansion, but through overland diplomacy, frontier commerce, and the remarkable institution of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing. From the seventeenth-century embassies of Ivan Petlin and Nikolai Milescu to the monumental scholarship of Nikita Bichurin and Vasily Vasilyev, from the Soviet-era Institute of the Far East to the challenges facing Russian sinology in the post-Soviet period, the Russian engagement with China has been shaped by proximity, rivalry, and an intellectual intensity that has produced some of the most distinguished contributions to world sinology. This chapter traces the development of Russian sinology across four centuries, drawing on the pioneering lectures of Zhang Xiping and the contribution of A. D. Pavlova.

I. The Seventeenth Century: First Contacts

1.1 Early Embassies

The earliest recorded contacts between Russia and China date to the fourteenth century, when captured Russians were incorporated into the Imperial Guard during the Yuan dynasty. The famous traveller Afanasy Nikitin mentioned “Hatay” (China) briefly in his fifteenth-century Voyage Beyond Three Seas. But it was in the seventeenth century, with the consolidation of the Romanov dynasty, that Russia began systematically seeking relations with China.

In 1618, the first Russian diplomatic embassy under Ivan Petlin departed Tobolsk for China. Though Petlin was refused an audience with the Ming emperor (having brought no gifts), his Rospis’ Kitaiskogo Gosudarstva (Description of the Chinese State) provided a detailed account of the overland route to China and a description of Beijing. Published in abridged translation by Bergeron in his Recueil de Divers Voyages (Leiden, 1729), Petlin’s report influenced not only Russian but also European geographical knowledge.

Subsequent embassies — under Fyodor Baikov (1654), Pyotr Godunov (1668–1669), and Nikolai Milescu-Spafari (1675–1676) — progressively deepened Russian understanding of China. Godunov compiled the first Russian “encyclopaedia” of China, drawing on diverse sources including Tatar and Bukharan informants. Milescu, a Moldavian scholar in Russian service, produced three substantial works on China and Siberia during and after his embassy, which were later incorporated into François Avril’s Voyage en Divers États d’Europe et d’Asie (Paris, 1692–1693).

1.2 The Treaty of Nerchinsk

By the late seventeenth century, Russian and Chinese frontiers had come into direct contact, leading to military clashes in the Amur region. The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) — China’s first treaty with a foreign state — regulated the border and established the framework for future relations. For sinology, the most important consequence was that it created the conditions for the sustained Russian presence in Beijing that would become the foundation of Russian Chinese studies.

II. The Eighteenth Century: Accumulation and Systematisation

2.1 The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing

The establishment of an Orthodox church in Beijing for captured Russian servicemen provided Russia with a unique institutional foothold in the Chinese capital. In 1715, the first Russian Ecclesiastical Mission was formally dispatched to Beijing. After the Treaty of Kyakhta (1727), the Mission became a regular, rotating institution, with each cohort comprising clergy and students who remained in Beijing for approximately ten years before being replaced. This arrangement — unparalleled among European nations — provided Russia with a continuous presence in China and an ongoing pipeline of language specialists and cultural informants for over two centuries. The Mission has justly been called “the cradle of Russian sinology.”

2.2 The First Generation of Sinologist-Translators

The students of the early Missions laid the foundations of Russian sinological scholarship through prodigious translation work:

Illarion Rossokhin (second Mission), who spent twelve years in Beijing and served as a translator at the Lifanyuan (理藩院) and the Cabinet Russian Language School, was the first Russian to translate Chinese texts directly into Russian. His works included the Qianzi Wen (千字文), Sanzi Jing (三字经), the Qinzheng Pingding Shuomo Fanglüe (亲征平定朔漠方略), and portions of the Daqing Yitong Zhi (大清一统志). His translation of the Baqi Tongzhi Chuji (八旗通志初集), published in sixteen volumes in St. Petersburg in 1784, remains a reference for scholars of Qing military history.

Aleksei Leontiev (third Mission) was the most prolific translator of the eighteenth century. He produced the first Russian versions of the Daxue (大学), the Yijing (易经, as an appendix to his translation of the Daqing Lüli), the Sanzi Jing, and the collection Chinese Thoughts. His translations — twenty-two published works in total — introduced Chinese political philosophy directly to the Russian reading public. The Daxue’s ideal of self-cultivation leading to good governance resonated powerfully with the Enlightenment aspirations of Catherine the Great’s Russia, and Leontiev’s works were reprinted multiple times and translated into German and French.

2.3 The St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences

Peter the Great’s founding of the Academy of Sciences in 1724 created an institutional framework for the systematic study of the East. The German Orientalist Theophil Siegfried Bayer, who joined the Academy in 1725, published the Museum Sinicum (1730) — the first European theoretical study of the Chinese language — and compiled a twenty-six-volume Latin-Chinese dictionary that was never published. Bayer also established a scholarly correspondence with Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, including Karel Slavíček and Antoine Gaubil, which enriched the Academy’s knowledge of Chinese astronomy, history, and geography.

The Academy organised major scientific expeditions to Siberia and the Chinese frontier (Messerschmidt, 1720–1727; Müller, 1732–1743; Pallas, 1767–1774), which generated extensive ethnographic and geographical data on China’s northern borderlands. The Academy also built one of Europe’s largest collections of Chinese manuscripts and books: by the end of the eighteenth century, its holdings numbered 238 titles.

2.4 Chinese Language Teaching

Organised Chinese language instruction in Russia began in 1738, when the Foreign Affairs Committee commissioned a captured Qing subject named Zhou Ge to teach Chinese and Manchu in Moscow. His student Leontiev became the most accomplished sinologist of the era. Rossokhin organised Chinese language classes at the Academy of Sciences from 1741 to 1751. In 1798, a formal school for Chinese, Manchu, Persian, Turkish, and Tatar translators was established under the Foreign Affairs Committee, marking the beginning of institutionalised sinological education in Russia.

III. The Nineteenth Century: The Age of Bichurin

3.1 Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin (1777–1853)

The figure who elevated Russian sinology to world significance was Nikita Bichurin (Иакинф Бичурин), head of the ninth Ecclesiastical Mission, who lived in Beijing for fourteen years (1808–1821). Bichurin mastered both classical and vernacular Chinese with extraordinary thoroughness, studied Chinese historical and geographical texts with passionate dedication, and collected a vast body of primary materials on China, Central Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia.

Bichurin’s scholarly output was prodigious. His major works include:

• Description of Tibet (1828), based on Chinese sources and his own knowledge, which introduced Russian and European readers to a largely unknown region;
• Notes on Mongolia (1828);
• History of the First Four Khans of the House of Genghis (1829), a meticulous reconstruction of Mongol history based on the Yuanshi;
• China, Its Inhabitants, Manners, Customs, and Education (1840), an extensive portrait of Chinese society;
• Detailed Description of China (1842), based on the Daqing Yitong Zhi, considered his finest work on Chinese geography;
• Collection of Materials on the Ancient Peoples of Central Asia (completed in his last years), a magisterial synthesis of Central Asian ethnography.

Bichurin received the Russian Academy of Sciences’ highest honour, the Demidov Prize, five times. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy and a member of the Paris Asiatic Society. His scholarship differed fundamentally from that of Western missionary-sinologists in that he rejected Eurocentric frameworks, argued for the uniqueness and independence of Chinese civilisation, and presented China on its own terms. The great Russian poets Pushkin and Zhukovsky were among his acquaintances, and his Verse Translation of the Three Character Classic (1829) entered the Russian literary mainstream.

Bichurin also made decisive contributions to Chinese language pedagogy. His Chinese Language Primer (Kitaiskaya Grammatika, 1838), based on materials developed during his teaching at Kyakhta, was the first systematic Chinese grammar written in Russian. It dominated Russian Chinese-language instruction until the early twentieth century and was reprinted as late as 1908.

3.2 Vasily Vasilyev (1818–1900)

The second towering figure of nineteenth-century Russian sinology was Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev, a student of the tenth Ecclesiastical Mission who spent ten years in Beijing (1840–1850). Vasilyev’s polymathic interests spanned Chinese language, literature, philosophy, history, geography, Buddhism, Daoism, and Tibetology. His contributions include:

• The Graphical System of Chinese Characters: An Attempt at a Chinese-Russian Dictionary (1867), which introduced the stroke-order indexing system that became the standard method in Russian lexicography for over a century;
• Analysis of Chinese Characters, the first European monograph on Chinese phonology, morphology, and writing systems;
• A History of Chinese Literature (1880), which made Chinese literary history a university subject for the first time anywhere in the world;
• Buddhism: Its Doctrines, History, and Literature and History of Indian Buddhism, which were translated into German and French and recognised as having surpassed all previous European scholarship on the subject;
• Foundational studies on Daoism that the contemporary Russian scholar Torchinov regarded as possessing “pioneering significance for world scholarship.”

Vasilyev held chairs at Kazan University and later at St. Petersburg University, training generations of sinologists. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 1866 and a full academician in 1886. His insistence that Chinese language possessed its own grammar — distinct from the grammatical categories of inflected languages — and his concept of “character roots” (zigen) were original contributions to comparative linguistics.

3.3 Archimandrite Palladius (Kafarov, 1817–1878)

Palladius Kafarov served three times in China (1840, 1849, 1859) and spent over twenty years there. He made significant contributions to the study of Buddhism in China (including a translation of the Life of the Buddha from the Tripitaka), Islam in China, Mongol history (translating the Changchun Zhenren Xiyouji), and Chinese Christianity. His posthumous Chinese-Russian Etymological Dictionary (Hanyu Eyu Hebi Yunbian, 1888), compiled and supplemented by the consul Popov, became the standard reference for Russian sinologists and diplomats for decades.

IV. The Twentieth Century: Institutionalisation and Ideologisation

4.1 The Late Imperial and Revolutionary Period

The twentieth century brought radical transformations to Russian sinology. The last decades of tsarist rule saw the establishment of the Oriental Faculty at St. Petersburg University, where Vasilyev’s successors — including Alekseev, the great literary sinologist — continued the tradition. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Chinese revolutions of 1911 and 1949 shifted scholarly attention from classical studies toward modern Chinese politics, economics, and society.

4.2 Soviet Sinology

Under Soviet rule, sinology was both expanded and constrained. The ideological kinship between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China (1949–1960) led to an enormous expansion of Chinese language training, the translation of Marxist-Leninist texts into Chinese and Chinese texts into Russian, and extensive scholarly exchanges. The major institutional centres were the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the Institute of the Far East (founded 1966), Leningrad (St. Petersburg) State University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies, and Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Countries. Soviet sinologists made important contributions to Chinese historical scholarship, linguistics, archaeology, and literary studies, though their work was often constrained by Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s severely disrupted academic exchange but also stimulated a new focus on contemporary Chinese politics and military affairs.

4.3 The Pavlova Contribution: A 400-Year Perspective

A. D. Pavlova (万山翠) of Moscow City University has argued that Russian sinology, celebrating over 400 years since the beginning of Russo-Chinese diplomatic contacts, constitutes a worthy and distinctive component of world sinology. Its defining characteristics include: the unique role of the Ecclesiastical Mission as a permanent scholarly outpost in Beijing; the early and sustained attention to China’s northern frontiers (Mongolia, Manchuria, Central Asia); the development of Chinese lexicography through the stroke-order system; and a tradition of treating Chinese civilisation with respect as an autonomous cultural system, from Bichurin’s rejection of missionary condescension to the Soviet emphasis on China as a fellow revolutionary society.

V. Post-Soviet Russian Sinology

5.1 Challenges and Continuities

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought severe challenges to Russian sinology. Funding for research institutes was drastically reduced; academic salaries fell to levels that drove talented scholars into business, journalism, or emigration; and several programmes were cut or downsized. St. Petersburg State University closed its programme on the Chinese economy around 2011 due to lack of financing. As one observer noted, only a few dozen scientific articles on China were being produced annually in Russian, and their quality lagged behind English-language output.

Nevertheless, Russian sinology has demonstrated considerable resilience. Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Countries continues to train sinologists, as does the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). The Association for the Advancement of Sinology (Russinology) serves as a professional network and organises the annual “Sinology in Russia” conference, the largest event of its kind in the country. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the deepening of Sino-Russian strategic relations since 2014 have generated new demand for China expertise, though the extent to which this translates into sustained scholarly investment remains to be seen.

5.2 Contemporary Strengths

Russian sinology retains particular strengths in several areas: classical Chinese philosophy and religion (continuing the tradition of Vasilyev and Alekseev); Central Asian and Mongol studies (building on Bichurin and Kafarov); Chinese language pedagogy and lexicography; and the study of Sino-Russian relations. The extraordinary archival holdings of the Russian Academy of Sciences — including the manuscripts of Rossokhin, Leontiev, Bichurin, and Vasilyev, as well as the Chinese book collections accumulated over three centuries — constitute an irreplaceable scholarly resource.

VI. Conclusion

Russian sinology is distinguished by its longevity, its institutional continuity through the Ecclesiastical Mission, and the towering achievements of scholars like Bichurin and Vasilyev, who approached China with a seriousness and sympathy that set them apart from many of their Western contemporaries. Bichurin’s insistence on studying China through Chinese sources, in the Chinese language, without the distorting lens of Western superiority, anticipated by more than a century the “China-centred” approach that Paul Cohen would later advocate in American sinology. The challenges facing Russian sinology today are real, but the tradition upon which it rests is deep and resilient, and the geographic, political, and cultural proximity of Russia and China ensures that the study of China will remain a matter of vital national interest for generations to come.

Bibliography

Bichurin, N. Ya. [Иакинф]. Kitaiskaya Grammatika [Chinese Grammar]. St. Petersburg, 1838.

Bichurin, N. Ya. Opisanie Tibeta [Description of Tibet]. St. Petersburg, 1828.

Bichurin, N. Ya. Statisticheskoe Opisanie Kitaiskoi Imperii [Detailed Description of China]. St. Petersburg, 1842.

Kafarov, Palladius, and P. S. Popov. Kitaisko-Russkii Slovar’ [Chinese-Russian Dictionary]. Beijing: Tongwen Guan, 1888.

Pavlova, A. D. (万山翠). “Sinology in Russia: 400 Years of Study” [俄罗斯400年的汉学研究]. Unpublished manuscript, Moscow City University.

Skachkov, P. E. Ocherki Istorii Russkogo Kitaevedeniya [Essays on the History of Russian Sinology]. Moscow: Nauka, 1977.

Vasilyev, V. P. Analiz Kitaiskikh Ieroglifov [Analysis of Chinese Characters]. St. Petersburg, 1866.

Vasilyev, V. P. Ocherk Istorii Kitaiskoi Literatury [Outline History of Chinese Literature]. St. Petersburg, 1880.

Zhang Xiping 张西平. Xifang Hanxue Shiliu Jiang 西方汉学十六讲. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2011. Lecture 14.

References

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