ABSTRACT
Russia was the site of Europe’s earliest Chinese settlements, formed by traders who walked across Asia to Moscow in the early Qing dynasty.1 It was chiefly by way of these settlements that the rest of Europe was initially colonised by Chinese migrants, who trickled westwards from their Russian bases.2 The Russian and Chinese empires first came into direct contact in the mid-seventeenth century, at the end of a simultaneous process of imperial expansion (from roughly opposite directions) into inner and northern Asia.3
