Author Archives: Joel

by | 23 March 2025 · 11:43 am

First Australian Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 26-27:

THE POLYNESIAN also circulated to Sydney, Australia, via Pacific whaling ships, bringing news of California gold to the antipodes. Between April 1849 and May 1850, some eleven thousand people left Australia for California. Mostly they came from Sydney, a combination of fortune seekers and former convicts. White Americans on the goldfields disliked the Australians, considering them to be criminals of rough and immoral character, claim jumpers and “hardened thieves and robbers.” The stereotype contained an element of truth in the predations of a San Francisco street gang known as the Sydney Ducks, so called for the convicts’ bowed legs and peculiar gait that resulted from years of wearing leg irons. But most Australian gold seekers were not former convicts; the California census of 1852 showed that Sydney men were more likely to be married with children, working, and noncriminals than Americans.

…

Colonists in New South Wales had noted the presence of gold since at least the 1840s, but authorities had not encouraged prospecting. In 1844 Governor FitzRoy quashed news of gold discoveries in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, believing it would inflame rebellion and disorder among the large population of convicts and former convicts; in 1849 Charles LaTrobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip district, broke up a minirush near Melbourne on grounds of trespass on crown lands. But news of California gold convinced colonial leaders that Australia’s future prosperity might lie in gold, not least to spur “a healthy emigration” of miners and workers to diminish the influence of convicts and paupers. FitzRoy appointed a geological surveyor in 1850 and announced his offer of a prize.

Hargraves set out to find gold. “I knew I was in gold country for 70 miles,” he wrote, before finding water to wash the earth at Auroya Goyong, near Bathurst, in February 1851. He enlisted three young men to help him, teaching them how to use a pan and build a rocker, skills he had learned in California. Hargraves claimed the reward (cutting out his three assistants), renamed the spot Ophir, and publicized his findings broadly. Within a few months there were several hundred people at the diggings, farmers and shepherds from the countryside and clerks and mechanics from Sydney.

The Australian gold rush was on. Observers remarked that Sydney virtually emptied of people as carpenters dropped their tools, merchants shuttered their shops, and house servants fled their masters’ homes. Not a few people from Port Phillip (Melbourne) trekked north up to Bathurst, but prospecting spread westward in earnest. In July 1851 the Port Phillip district of New South Wales separated and founded the new colony of Victoria. A month later gold seekers hit a rich strike north of Geelong. By mid-October upward of ten thousand people made their way to the central midlands of Victoria; many diggers were taking out an ounce of gold a day (£3). Most important, perhaps, Hargraves had introduced the “California rocker” to Australia, which enabled more efficient washing than tin pots and dishes. Over the next decade 170,000 colonial settlers (nearly half the entire nonnative population) moved to the goldfields, and another 573,000 gold seekers arrived from abroad, mainly from the British Isles, as well as continental Europe, California, and China. Chinese called Victoria Xinjinshan, or New Gold Mountain, and renamed California Jiujinshan, Old Gold Mountain. To this day Chinese call the city of San Francisco Jiujinshan.

Honolulu was, and still is, called Tanxiangshan (Sandalwood Mountain) in Chinese.

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Filed under Australia, China, economics, Hawai'i, labor, language, migration, Pacific, U.S.

by | 21 March 2025 · 5:56 am

South China’s Gold Rush Diaspora

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 32-36:

THE VAST MAJORITY OF Chinese gold diggers in California and Victoria hailed not from Shanghai but from southern China, especially the Siyi, or four counties, that lay on the western side of the Pearl River delta in Guangdong province. Remarkably, the vast majority came from just one county, Xinning [= Taishan]. Xinning was a poor place, owing to its rocky soil and hilly terrain, its cycles of drought and flood, and its relative isolation from the market. The land produced only enough rice to feed its people for half the year, so farmers grew sweet potatoes and peanuts on the hillsides to supplement their crops. Instability from British economic penetration and local political violence made conditions worse. Families sent sons and brothers to nearby cities for seasonal work as laborers, peddlers, and factory workers. No one knows who were the first Chinese from Xinning to venture to California, but they had probably already migrated from their home villages to Guangzhou or its environs. What is clear is that they established a classic pattern of chain migration to California and Victoria and, soon afterward, to the goldfields of Canada and New Zealand. Gold seekers from the Siyi founded the Chinese diaspora in North America and Australasia.

…

THE GOLD RUSHES BROUGHT large numbers of Chinese and Euro-Americans into contact with each other on an unprecedented scale, far surpassing the limited experience of European colonial enclaves in Chinese port cities or the occasional Chinese visitors to the United States and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The San Francisco Customs Office noted 325 arrivals from China in 1849 and 450 in 1850; in 1850 Chinese comprised only one percent of the California mining population. But 2,700 Chinese arrived in 1851 and 20,000 in 1852. Chinese comprised about 10 percent of the total population of California by the late 1850s, and upward of 25 percent in the mining districts. A similar pattern exists in Australia. By 1859 there were at 40,000 to 50,000 Chinese in Victoria, roughly 20 to 25 percent of the mining population. Historians of the Australian rush have remarked that many Britons had never “mixed so freely with foreigners, especially the Chinese.”

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Filed under Australia, Canada, China, economics, labor, migration, New Zealand, U.S.

by | 20 March 2025 · 3:05 am

Pacific Trade Growth in 1849

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 23-25:

Even as the forty-niners poured in from the eastern United States, California’s Pacific connections grew. Who would feed and provision the masses of gold seekers? There were entrepreneurs among the forty-niners, like Robert LeMott, who quickly sold a stock of pants and nails he had brought from Pennsylvania. But emigrants from the East could bring only small amounts of goods with them, and there was little farming in California to support the forty-niners, least of all in the hills. Most American merchants who sold provisions and amenities during the gold rush dealt in imported goods—dried fish and beef jerky, canvas and clothing, tools, lumber, candles, coffee, livestock, and even prefabricated houses—from Honolulu, Valparaiso, and Oregon; from Hong Kong and Sydney. LeMott, who speculated broadly, invested in clothing, especially that which was “heavy, well made, and of dark colors.” He wrote that merchants were making a 50 percent profit on everything they sold. Or more: in 1851 over 300,000 barrels of foreign flour—mostly from Chile—entered San Francisco, selling at an average price of thirteen dollars per barrel, compared to one dollar a barrel in New England.

The schooner Julia exemplified the changing Pacific trade of the era. She was a prize ship seized during the Mexican war, bought at auction by an American in December 1847 and registered in Honolulu. A decline in the number of Pacific whaling ships calling at Hawaiian ports had created an economic slump there in the spring of 1848, but the gold rush opened new opportunities, according to the Polynesian, for “an immense market for our products.” From June to October 1848, nearly thirty ships left Honolulu for San Francisco, carrying all manner of goods and provisions. The Julia’s voyage that summer commanded payments of $30,000 for cargo shipped by the Honolulu firm of Skinner and Company, which chartered the ship, and hefty sums from consignees, including $50,000 for Starkey Janion and Company and $6,700 for the Hudson’s Bay Company—all paid in gold. Soon the Julia would add a Honolulu-Guangzhou leg to her journeys across the Pacific.

The Julia’s transpacific travels linked Old and New World trade by connecting California to a longer history of British and American interests in China. The Hudson’s Bay agent in San Francisco who sent the gold sample to Hong Kong for advice on its quality knew it was much faster to get from San Francisco to Hong Kong than to London. The San Francisco-Honolulu-Hong Kong connection also was one of the main ways that people in both Hong Kong and California received news about each other. Just as the Hong Kong paper Friend of China reprinted news from California that was reported in the Honolulu Polynesian, the San Francisco newspaper the Californian reprinted news from the Friend of China, which traveled via Honolulu.

The gold rush dramatically changed the nature of the U.S.-China trade. Yankee merchants in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, anchored in the traditional U.S.-China trade to Boston and New York via the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, had already begun to establish transpacific routes in the 1830s and ’40s. They linked China to Hawaii and then to California, which was less a final destination than a transshipment point for goods headed to Acapulco, Valparaiso, or, via the Horn, New York. The gold rush represented a new opportunity for merchants in Hong Kong—both Euro-Americans and Chinese—to export diverse goods to California.

Hong Kong was a British colony and a free port—that is, imported goods from one place could be unloaded and reloaded for export to another place without payment of customs duty—and as such it quickly became the premier Asian entrepôt for both goods and emigrants headed for the gold mountains. For the year 1849 alone, twenty-three vessels exported nearly five thousand tons of goods from Hong Kong to San Francisco, including sugar, rice, and tea; beer, coffee, cigars, and chocolate; hats and clothing; furniture and canvas; tools and implements; timber logs and planks, window frames, bricks, and marble slabs. In 1849 Chinese imported and erected some 75 to 100 buildings, modular designs of premade frames and constructed with interlocking camphor wood panels. Most of these were built in San Francisco—including John Frémont’s home—but some were erected in the interior. One such “Chinese house” built in Double Springs, Calaveras County, was used as the county courthouse, then as the post office, and later as a chicken coop. In the early 1850s, Hong Kong merchants shipped thousands of blocks of granite, along with Chinese workers, for building the homes and businesses of San Francisco’s new elites.

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Filed under Australia, China, economics, Hawai'i, industry, labor, migration, Pacific, publishing, U.S.

by | 19 March 2025 · 6:28 am

First Hong Kong to California Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 19-21:

California gold arrived in Hong Kong at Christmas, 1848. It came as a packet of gold dust sent by George Allan, the San Francisco agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The envelope contained a small sample taken from a payment that Allan had made for a shipment of goods, sent from the company in Hawaii to San Francisco—$6,720—payment that was made entirely in gold dust, about 420 ounces of it (two and a half cups in volume). Allan wrote to his counterpart in Honolulu, “No one here seems to doubt for a moment the purity of the Gold Dust,” but he asked that the sample be sent “forward with all dispatch” to British experts in China for evaluation.

The same ship that brought gold dust to Hong Kong also carried recent issues of the Polynesian, a Honolulu newspaper. Hong Kong’s English-language weekly, Friend of China, often reprinted articles from the Polynesian for local consumption. In the January 6 edition, Hong Kong readers learned that six thousand people had taken gold valued at $4 million out of the earth in the six months since its discovery in California. The account predicted at least twenty thousand more arrivals in the coming year and the production of $62 million of gold in 1849, one-third of the world’s total product of gold and half of the world’s silver product in 1846. If the numbers (just predictions, really) weren’t exciting enough, the paper reported that digging for gold was not complicated. It involved simply collecting gravel in the bed of a stream and separating gold from the dirt by means of gravity and a little mercury. The arrival of the latest news and of gold itself sent a wave of excitement throughout the British colonial port. The following week the English brig Richard and William carried the first gold seekers from Hong Kong to California. They were not Chinese but Americans, including a former opium runner, a tavern owner, and a livery stable keeper.

Chinese gold seekers were not far behind. Yuan Sheng, a businessman, left Hong Kong on May 6 on the English bark Swallow, along with two other passengers and a cargo of Chinese goods. Yuan Sheng was from the Zhongshan region of Guangdong province. He was born on Sanzao, one of the small islands off the coast, near Macao. Yuan had actually been to the United States before: he had traveled to New York in 1820, probably on one of the clipper ships of the early China trade, and from there he had gone to Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a merchant. While in the United States, Yuan Sheng became a Christian and a naturalized American citizen. It’s not known when he returned to China, but in 1849 he decided to go back to America, this time to California, most likely not to dig for gold but to find business opportunities in San Francisco, another kind of golden fortune. He already knew English and something of the ways of American life, notwithstanding the differences between New York, South Carolina, and California.

Yuan Sheng went by the Anglicized name of Norman Assing. His selection of this name is intriguing. His surname is a homophone for the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) that was founded by Kublai Khan, the son of Genghis Khan. He might have chosen Norman after the medieval Europeans, a contemporary analogue of the Yuan. The Normans and Mongols were formidable conquering forces of their time. Sheng, his given name, means “birth”; Assing is a rendering of “Ah-Sing,” the familiar form of address of his name in Cantonese. Yuan Sheng means “born of the Yuan”; Norman Assing suggests “born of the Normans.” His choice was a clever point of pride even if it remained opaque to his American acquaintances. An English-speaking merchant, Yuan Sheng was one of the few Chinese headed for California who were named in the ship’s passenger manifest. We are not certain of those who ventured before him. Only seven Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1848. When Yuan Sheng arrived in July 1849, there were barely fifty Chinese in California. Euro-Americans writing about exciting polyglot scenes on the streets of San Francisco in 1849 invariably commented on the Chinese they encountered, both high-cultured men in flowing silk robes and miners carrying bamboo poles strung with tools, straw hats, and gigantic boots.

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by | 18 March 2025 · 6:25 am

Chinese Gold Rush Destinations

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 14-15:

GOLD MINING IS famously risky, with high stakes, often compared to gambling. Driven by the desire for wealth, gold seekers took great risks that were explainable only by the potential for reward. Gold fever drove daring, hard work, technological invention, and political experimentation, as well as violence against humans and against the environment. The cold calculus of business, banking, and geopolitical interests harnessed gold fever for profit and advantage. For companies and nation-states, the desire for gold led to enormous expenditures of capital for digging and operating deeper and deeper mines. But the deeper the ore, the scarcer it was and the lower its grade, such that more and more rock had to be excavated for smaller and smaller yields of the precious metal. In the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa, for example, in 1905 it took on average 2.3 tons of ore to yield one ounce of gold worth $20.67. Hence the relentless drive for cheap labor in order to make gold mining payable.

Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa recruited sixty thousand indentured Chinese mine laborers to work in highly capitalized and industrialized, deep underground mines. Their indenture marked an important difference in experience from that of the independent prospectors who went to North America and Australasia. But there were also broad similarities in the patterns of Chinese workers’ culture and resistance. This book tracks the migration of Chinese gold seekers to California, to the Australian colony of Victoria, and to the deep mines of the Witwatersrand. It considers how their experience and reception contributed to the evolution of their identity as “Chinese,” to China’s identity as a nation, and to their identification in the West as a global racial danger.

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, industry, labor, migration, nationalism, slavery, South Africa, U.S.

by | 17 March 2025 · 6:03 am

Chinese Empire Demand for Silver

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 9-10:

AT THE TIME OF the gold rushes, China was already in the grip of European colonialism. China was never directly colonized by a Western power; in fact, by the mid-eighteenth century the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had built an empire of its own, having expanded China’s boundaries to the west, most notably by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang. But in the mid-nineteenth century China was battered by European aggressions: the opium trade, gunboat diplomacy, and the forced opening to Western trade and missionaries. China’s humiliation stood in stark contrast to the position it had once held, even relatively recently.

For two hundred years, from 1550 to 1750, China had been arguably the most important economic actor in the world. It was not only the single largest domestic economy; it was also at the center of global trade, both with its Sino-centric tributary and trading networks in East and Southeast Asia and as the premier destination market for silver produced in Spanish America and Japan. Europeans shipped silver to China not as “money” but as commodity arbitrage: the Ming Dynasty’s (1368–1644) demand for silver for fiscal and commercial purposes fetched the highest silver prices in the world, double its price in Europe. China was the world’s great “silver sink” that not only drew but also stimulated its production in the New World.

Through the seventeenth century, Europeans traded silver for luxuries, including gold. For example, the British East India Company’s first direct transaction with China in 1637 exchanged 60,000 Spanish dollars for sugar, silk, spices, porcelain, and “loose gould.” Chinese traders also made handsome profits by buying low and selling dear, earning gross profits of 100 to 150 percent on silk and silk textiles sold to Europeans. Economic historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giràldez describe these late sixteenth-century dynamics of global trade as “multiple arbitrage.”

Europeans began trading silver for tea in large quantities in the early eighteenth century. Like silk, tea was a luxury item in Europe, but it had greater potential for mass consumption. The creation of a mass market for tea in Europe coincided with the rise in consumption of sugar from the plantation-slave colonies of the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, tea and sugar, along with tobacco, undergirded a global trade in stimulants—“food drugs”—based on a symbiosis of colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and new mass-consumption economies in European metropolitan societies, especially Britain, on the other.

By 1800 silver’s arbitrage advantage in China had ended. The British, now hooked on tea, looked for a different means of exchange. The East India Company had already drained India of much of its silver to sell in China; now it turned to India for the mass production of opium for export to China.

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Filed under Britain, Caribbean, China, drugs, economics, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Mexico, nationalism

by | 16 March 2025 · 2:52 pm

Chinese Gold Rush Emigration

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 2-4:

THE CHINESE WHO WENT to the gold rushes were part of an expanding population of Chinese living abroad in the nineteenth century. Since at least the thirteenth century of the Common Era, people from China’s southeastern coastal provinces had traded in Southeast Asia, from Indonesia and the Philippines to Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula to Thailand. But in the nineteenth century they traveled much farther from home, spurred by both need and opportunity. A quarter-million Chinese went as indentured laborers to European plantation colonies in the Caribbean as part of the notorious coolie trade that exploited Chinese and Indian workers after the abolition of slavery.

An even greater number of Chinese, more than 300,000, went as voluntary emigrants to the United States and to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century, attracted first by the gold rushes. The Chinese gold seekers were not, of course, the first to cross the great ocean—that distinction is held by the Polynesian peoples whose seaborne migrations began over one thousand years BCE. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish ran a yearly galleon trade between Acapulco and Manila, the long middle leg of a journey that traded New World silver to China for silks, porcelain, and other luxuries for Europe. By the early nineteenth century, a budding U.S.-China trade of northwestern American furs and pelts and Hawaiian sandalwood drew new routes across the ocean.

But the gold rushes were of another order. They exploded the early modern Pacific maritime world. Vibrant new routes and networks of trade and migration were established, nourished by gold first in California, then in Australia. Three new and lasting nodes of the transpacific rose to prominence: Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Sydney.

The goldfields were international contact zones on the frontiers of Anglo-American settler societies. The rushes attracted gold seekers from around the world—from the eastern and southern United States; from the British Isles and Continental Europe; from Mexico and Chile and Hawaii; from Australia and China. The gold seekers’ arrival to the frontiers of white settlement made them participants, to one degree or other, in the elimination of indigenous peoples and in the formation of new communities and nations. How would these new polities reckon with the diverse character of the goldfield populations? Who would be included and who would be excluded? And who would decide, and by what means?

The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the “Chinese Question.”

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, China, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, U.S.

by | 15 March 2025 · 8:17 am

Inspecting Ust Kara Mines, 1885

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 166-169:

Greek mining engineers advised Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century that mineral wealth lay underground in the regions east of Lake Baikal. Hard labor convicts were soon digging down to the silver veins in the vicinity of Nerchinsk. Gold mining began later near the Kara River, a name derived from a Tatar word meaning “black.” The Nerchinsk Mining Region, as it became known, eventually stretched over thousands of square miles from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Chinese border.

In late October 1885 Kennan and Frost rode their horses through the valley of the Kara River to the prison complex at Ust Kara, or Kara mouth, the first of the prisons, convict settlements, and open placer gold mines stretching twenty miles up the valley. In addition to Ust Kara, there were the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kara and Upper Kara convict settlements, and the Upper Prison. Their total exile population was around twenty-five hundred, of whom two-thirds were hard-labor convicts and the rest women and children who had accompanied their husbands and fathers to the mines. Many of the political convicts in Eastern Siberia were held at Kara.

…

Kennan and Frost went directly to the prison commandant’s residence where they were greeted by Maj. Potuloff, who was in charge of Kara’s common-law convict prisons. Potuloff, a tall, cordial man in his fifties with a bushy beard and soldierly bearing, explained that he had been alerted by telegram to expect Kennan and Frost, but he never thought that the two would make it through from Stretinsk at this time of the year. He laughed when Kennan inquired where they could find a place to stay for the night. Other than the accommodations for criminals, he explained, the only place to stay was in his home, which they were welcome to do. Kennan and Frost had no alternative than to accept his offer “and in minutes [we] were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.”

They found themselves effectively under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Maj. Potuloff’s home. He never left them alone, in fact, he seemed to have relinquished his official duties during Kennan and Frost’s stay in order to keep an eye on them. Once, when Kennan moved in the direction of his overcoat, Maj. Potuloff asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out for exercise.”

“Wait a minute and I will go with you.” Kennan’s bedroom, which was on the ground floor across the front hall from the sitting room, had no door but only a thin curtain. The sentries posted night and day outside the house could even look in his bedroom through its curtainless windows.

Under Maj. Potuloff’s watchful eye, Kennan inspected prisons that were the now-familiar “perfect hell[s] of misery,” from the impossible overcrowding to the filth and vermin to the lack of any bedding for the inmates. “Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs.” But no matter how many Siberian prisons Kennan inspected, he always marveled at the unendurable smell. His descriptions of prison odors steadily grew more vivid and literary the farther east he went. Of the air in the Ust Kara prison, which Maj. Potuloff readily acknowledged was repulsive, Kennan later wrote, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it.”

During Kennan’s prison inspections, convicts complained to Maj. Potuloff and even approached Kennan on the assumption that “I must be an inspector sent to Kara to investigate the prison management.” Several convicts pleaded with Maj. Potuloff that they had been imprisoned for months but still did not know what they were charged with. Another insisted that he had already finished his sentence. One man explained that he had gotten drunk on the exile march and exchanged names with another convict and ended up at Kara serving a hard labor sentence when, had he kept his name, he only would have been sent to a settlement as a forced colonist.

Bartering names for food, drink, or clothing was a common practice among the exiled convicts and not easily detected since the convoy and prison guards could hardly familiarize themselves with the faces of hundreds of convicts. The exchange, which the artels ruthlessly enforced, invariably improved one barterer’s position to the distinct disadvantage of some hapless exile who had spent his money or gambled away his clothing, and thereby gotten himself, as Kennan explained, “into such a condition that for five or ten rubles and a bottle of vodka he will sell his very soul.” Maj. Potuloff ignored the convicts and their complaints.

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by | 14 March 2025 · 4:46 am

Early Siberian Exile System

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-124:

The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich [by Boris Godunov]. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand. Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far-flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”

As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.

…

For centuries convicts began marching to Siberia from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in European Russia, often starting their march on the Vladimirka road. At the first post station, which was called Gorenki, from the word gore, meaning grief, family members who were not accompanying a convict to Siberia could get a last glimpse of their loved one. In his iconic Vladimirka, the Russian artist Isaac Levitan painted the view ahead of a marching exile: a dirt road stretching to the horizon under a vast sky. By the time of Kennan’s investigation, trains and then barges transported convicts into Siberia but many of them still had to march more than halfway across a continent to their final destinations in parties of three hundred or more guarded by Russian soldiers on foot and by mounted Cossacks.

The sight of an exile party stunned travelers in Siberia. In January 1828, a young woman making her way through Siberia in subzero temperatures to join her exiled fiancé heard a strange noise from her carriage. “It was the noise of the fetters … an entire party of people was in chains—some were even chained to a metal pole. These unfortunates were a terrible sight. To protect their faces from the cold they had covered them with some dirty rags into which they had cut holes for their eyes.” On an overcast morning in 1856, an English traveler observed, beneath a double row of birch trees on the Great Siberian Post Road, “a long line of drab-clad figures marching in the same direction as ourselves. We instinctively know what it is but can still hardly believe that a story so sad, so strange, so distant, is being realised before our eyes.” Kennan never carried out his plan to march with an exile party, possibly because he was denied permission but equally likely because he had observed the experience of the exile parties to be so dreadful.

No one seemed to question or care whether, after a forced march of thousands of miles, cold-blooded killers and an assortment of thieves, incorrigibles, misfits, malcontents, and regime enemies could become productive workers in the Siberian mines and factories. In fact many of the convicts who reached Eastern Siberia, according to one report from local authorities, “arrived exhausted, prematurely enfeebled, having contracted incurable diseases, having forgotten their trades, and having grown quite unaccustomed to labour.” Local Siberian officials regularly commandeered the healthiest convicts from the marching parties to meet their own needs, which further aggravated the shortage of able workers.

So many exiled convicts died on Siberian roads that the peasants, who had to dispose of the bodies, protested to the government in St. Petersburg, which only sent back orders to the local authorities to pay for the burials. Some convicts took years to reach their destinations but their time on the journey did not count as part of their sentence. One convict was on the road for eight years, but his eight-year sentence did not start until he finally entered a prison factory in Irkutsk. The authorities did not want the convicts to run out their sentences by feigning illness or otherwise finding ways to delay their arrivals at the prisons, factories, and mines.

Notwithstanding the human wastage, enough productive convicts reached their destinations to justify the exile system to the St. Petersburg and Siberian bureaucracies. As Kennan wrote, “One is surprised not that so many die but that so many get through alive.” Factories, salt works, distilleries, farms, and mines in Siberia continued to demand more workers and the regime continued to send them by, for example, allowing landowners and monasteries to turn over their troublesome serfs to the state for exile. Siberia became the jewel in the Romanov crown and played a role in the rise of the Russian Empire comparable to that of India in the ascension of the British Empire.

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by | 13 March 2025 · 5:44 am

Siberian Postal System, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle p. 121:

The Siberian postal system was well organized. Carriages plied the Siberian roads between cities, villages, and towns carrying leather pouches filled with mail. Each day Irkutsk, the largest city in Siberia, received mail from Moscow, which was twenty-six hundred miles away, and delivered it back three times a week. The system allowed Kennan’s and Frost’s wives and friends to send them letters care of the post offices in larger Siberian cities, based on their expected itinerary, and for them to send letters back to the United States. Kennan mailed a letter to Century publisher Roswell Smith reporting that their success in gaining access to the Tiumen prison was “beyond my expectations” and that Frost had made numerous sketches and taken many photographs despite the balky equipment. Kennan had seen the prison in its “every-day aspect” and was confident that “nothing was fixed for my inspection” because “such a prison as that cannot be temporarily fixed.”

Overall, it was a positive report but for a note of self-doubt. Kennan described the forwarding prison as “the worst” he had ever encountered and, if it turned out to be representative, “I shall have to take back some things that I have said and written about the exile system.”

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