Oddly enough, Kyakhta on the frontier itself more closely resembled the typical Russian fortress town, built as a square and surrounded by palisades and a moat. Inside was a wooden church, the commander’s residence, a rhubarb storehouse, barracks, a large bazaar, a distillery, and a few houses of spacious design where wealthy merchants lived. But just to the south, perhaps 250 yards away, lay the completely Chinese village of Maimachin, a name meaning “Buy and Sell” in Chinese. Its streets were laid out straight from gate to gate, very clean and lined with bamboo houses spread over with sizing; within, the floors were covered with clay, and the walls papered over with colorful prints. The windows (generally large, with painted paper panes) had a grating made of small, delicately chased rods. Smoke from the kitchens was ingeniously diverted downward through a pipe that passed into a smokestack built onto the street. Between the two towns stood a boundary post neatly etched with parallel inscriptions. One, in Russian, read: “Here ends the Russian Empire.” The other, in Mongolian, “Here begins the Chinese domain.” There was considerable friendly interchange between the two towns, but toward evening each day a bell would ring, and according to a strictly observed regulation, Chinese and Russian citizens alike would promptly withdraw.
Of all Siberian towns, however, Irkutsk was unquestionably the most cosmopolitan. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when its configuration was still that of a palisaded square, its chief attractions were a bazaar, a meat market, several all-night saloons, and a bathhouse for traveling merchants. By the beginning of the nineteenth it had grown into a pleasant little city of some fifteen thousand inhabitants, with a cathedral, a dozen churches, several mansions, and numerous stately private homes. By 1875, a Russian ethnographer could enthusiastically describe Irkutsk as “chic: in no other Siberian town will you find shops with such luxurious goods and exquisite taste, such magnificent carriages, such dazzling society... Now you are in an academic circle, now at a meeting where economic issues are being solved, now at a charity committee meeting, now at a literary soiree.”525
Then in July 1879 a hayloft was accidentally set on fire, and the conflagration that followed destroyed three quarters of the town. The “Fire Department” failed miserably, as “many were drunk,” wrote an eyewitness, and the firemen had no means of conducting water by hose from the river, but carried it in large barrels on wheels.526 When the inner city was rebuilt, many new brick and stone structures went up, but the result was a strange mixture of squalor and grandeur, since the streets were still unpaved and the sidewalks nothing but plank causeways over open sewers, and a full ten years later traces of the devastation remained.
These contrasts permeated the city’s life. Many settlers straggled into town with little more than the clothes on their backs; others, triumphant at the head of a caravan of steamer trunks loaded with hand spun linens, chastened dinnerware, silver samovars, and crystal. Every society residence had a grand piano (even if it was used only for decoration), drawing rooms stocked with books and even foreign magazines, and rare prints and fashion plates on the walls. Some had tall porcelain stoves and large double windows, too, courtyards with riding stables, servants’ quarters, and perhaps an enclosed verandah or porch. On the Angara River stood a palace designed in 1804 by the Italian architect Jacomo Queringgi and financed by the gold merchant and shipping magnate Alexander Sibiryakov. Known later as the “White House,” it became the residence of the governor-general of Eastern Siberia. The old bazaar had been replaced by a market hall of stone, with rows of shops stocked with goods from both Europe and China, and some of the public buildings would not have seemed out of place in London, Paris, and Rome. Irkutsk, in fact, was respectfully christened the “Paris of Siberia”; nor was its citizenry out of touch with continental tastes. Just a few years after Weber’s opera Der Freishutz had its debut, the local military band could play selections upon request.
Outwardly, indeed, the city was gay and prosperous – even a little too worldly to be entirely pleasing to some of the Victorians and their families who passed through. One visitor found the ladies of high society “lazy, indolent creatures, with no ideas beyond immoral intrigues,” who lay around all day smoking cigarettes, and stayed up until dawn.527 They spent lavishly on clothes, read “yellow-backed French novels,” and created “perfumed little nests” for themselves in their boudoirs with low, luxurious couches, Turkish embroideries, and Persian rugs. Yet a few blocks from the “White House” a solitary pedestrian was liable to be strangled “with a short stick and a noose of twine” or lassoed in a blizzard by a criminal in a passing sleigh.528 In some streets, “pigs wallowed in liquid filth”529; and in the restaurant of the Old Metropole Hotel, guests might be entertained by “a troupe of girls from Warsaw [who] sang lewd songs, and then came and drank champagne with the audience.”530
In back rooms, Chinese gold smugglers, posing as tea merchants, plied a sepulchral trade. Whenever one of their brethren died, they insisted on sending him home for burial, and as part of their embalming operation, blew gold dust up his nostrils through a tube into the empty skull.
Siberia’s rapid transformation had made for some extraordinary incongruities elsewhere too. Because of its central location, Tomsk, for example, was one of Western Siberia’s main import-export hubs. The city had learned from the fiery calamity that had befallen Irkutsk and erected several fire stations, each with a high turret surrounded by a balcony, where watchmen with field glasses were posted day and night. It had electric lights and other contemporary conveniences, but the streets remained unpaved and every droshky raised a cloud of dust or (after a rainfall) splattered through swamps of mud. In winter, milk was often delivered to the houses in frozen blocks; yet in summer, oranges and lemons could be had from as far away as Sicily.
Although Tomsk was home to some of Siberia’s richest merchants, and its intellectual and cultural life, revolving around the university, was vibrant, its elite remained hopelessly gauche. At a typical day-long feast at one of the great houses, according to one participant,
You sit around and take a hand at cards or from one in a dice party. Ten minutes elapse, the host comes round, pats each one of his guests on the shoulder, and at the same time flicks his third finger against his neck. This is the Siberian invitation for a drink. The crowd collects around the table, each takes a glass filled with vodki [sic], or with some one or other of the many mysterious compounds which go under the name of Siberian liqueurs, tosses it off, makes a grimace, sometimes the sign of the cross, gulps down a bit of bread and sardine, and wanders back to the card table.
In another ten minutes a huge sturgeon, smoking hot, is brought in on a dish. The host comes round again, again pats shoulders, but this time moves his jaws convulsively, as if in the action of eating. Up rises the crowd once more, in order to make a combined attack upon the sturgeon with finger or with fork, washing down toothsome morsels with more vodki. Back again to card-playing, and up again to eat or drink – so the day wears on.531
In 1876, when about one tenth of the world’s gold came from Siberia, Tomsk was also the repository of much of what was mined north of the Altai in the western regions, just as Irkutsk was the depot for what Eastern Siberia produced. At Tomsk, it was sequestered in deep, medieval-like dungeons, “guarded by heavily armed soldiers; ponderous gates and doors; keys a foot long; rusty hinges, bolts.”532 In the inner sanctum, enormous iron safes let into the walls had locks specially sealed with wax, and in the smelting room was a little scale “so true that a piece of paper was weighed against so many hairs.”533 “I afterwards wrote my name on the paper in pencil,” one visitor recalled, “and the weight of my signature was clearly shown.”534 The Siberians also developed some of the best gold-washing machines in the world.