The Negotiated Geography of the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) and the Role of the Jesuits

Abstract

The 1689 peace negotiations in Nerchinsk between Muscovite Russia and Qing China resulted in the first bilateral settlement of the territorial disputes between the two empires and led to extensive surveys in the frontier region. More importantly, the surviving textual and material evidence qualifies this encounter as a site of knowledge exchange that provides exemplary insights into the Jesuits' activities as knowledge brokers in late imperial China. By using Jesuit, Russian, and Qing sources, this article reconstructs the exchange of geographic information in Nerchinsk and traces the knowledge fragments that made up the Jesuits' new spatial imagination of these lands. In arguing that their European cartographic training ultimately prevented them from successfully integrating the fragments of local geographic knowledge that were exchanged at the negotiations, it presents the Jesuits as highly problematic go-betweens and their allegedly "superior" knowledge as essentially refracted.