ABSTRACT
Chinese tea bound for Kiakhta is not sewn into hides, but simply wrapped in felts made of camel or sheep fur. This is a quotation from Dmitrii Ivanovich Stakheev’s 1870 work entitled From China to Moscow: The Story of a Tea Chest. Accurate knowledge about the interior of China remained hard to come by for Russians in the years prior to the 1870s. Dmitrii Stakheev had never been inside China proper, but he had seen it. Keeping this dearth of basic knowledge in mind allows us to appreciate the significance of published geographical accounts by Russian travelers through China in the 1870s. The Russian authors’ specific observations on transportation infrastructure and networks, although they may appear on first sight dry, technical, or mundane, are actually more interesting and revealing. To be sure, details of tea manufacture and transport were not the Russian Geographical Society main concern.
