3 - The rediscovery of the Amur

Summary

“My ardent love for Russia … will serve as my excuse”

One of the clearest indications of the obscurity surrounding the Amur region in the early decades of the nineteenth century was the fact that practically nothing about the river appeared in print. What was published at the time was located for the most part in a highly specialized literature and directed to a select audience which had some practical reason to be concerned with the Russian Far East. The picture of the region that emerged out of these accounts was unalluring and undistinguished, and moreover was one which carefully accorded with the official position of the government. The most extensive of these treatments – Grigorii Spasskii's 1824 essay “Historical and Statistical Notes about Places along the River Amur” – offered a good example of this latter point, for although the author made it clear that Russia had relinquished the region to China in the late seventeenth century, he did not comment on the injustice of the Treaty of Nerchinsk and did not even allude to the issue of reacquisition. Elsewhere Spasskii did discuss the value of the Amur in a manner that had rather more contemporary overtones, by indicating the region's potential importance as a supply base for Russia's North Pacific settlements, but again he did not call for the reacquisition of the Amur, even in muted tones or by implication.