In the middle of our stay in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia and our first “home” in Siberia, we left town and spent a night in Kyakhta. Located about 100 miles to the south of Ulan-Ude, Kyakhta was the sole point of overland trade between the Russian and Chinese empires through the end of the 19th century. Founded in 1727 to execute the treaty of Kyakhta, it quickly grew rich through the tea trade and became known as “the only city of millionaires in the world.”
Today, it’s considerably less glamorous. One point I was really excited to see was the Kyakhta river–the reason for Kyakhta’s location. The founder of the city, diplomat Saava Raguzinsky, wanted to make it impossible for the Chinese to poison the city’s water supply if hostilities should ever break out. Thus he chose the only point on the Chinese-Russian border with a river that flowed North to South.
Despite Raguzinsky’s best efforts, the river has been poisoned–from the North. Trash covers its banks. While I was there, I tripped and felt my foot brush something pointed. I looked down and realized I’d almost been impaled by a 6-inch nail.
The river isn’t the only point of interest, of course, and most of them are better maintained. A five-minute walk from the west bank of the river lies the Voskresenskiy Sobor (in English, The Cathedral of The Resurrection), an imitation of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. 19th-century American visitor Thomas Knox describes its cost:
The double doors in front of the altar are of solid silver, and are said to weigh two thousand pounds avoirdupois. Besides these doors I think I saw nearly a ton of silver in the various paraphernalia of the church. There were several fine paintings executed in Europe at heavy cost, and the floors, walls and roof of the entire structure were of appropriate splendor. The church was built at the expense of the Kiakhta merchants.
Today the cathedral is far too humble for a city of millionaires. The inside is bare but well-kept, only simple, white-washed walls covered with icons. I was happy to see a thriving church community on the bulletin board; the current austerity of the cathedral’s design seems not to have dampened enthusiasm. Thanks to our guide Rada, we received special permission to go up into the belltower, which offered a wonderful view of Kyakhta and, across the border, Mongolia.
Just across the street from the church, we visited the city’s gostiny dvor. Both a shopping mall and a trading floor, the gostiny dvor was where people would haggle over the price of tea, weight it, repack it and trade various other goods. Like the river, it is unprotected from abuse, and the entrance is festooned with fascist graffiti. Out front there’s a Lenin statue that looks surprisingly new and serves as a reminder of how destructive and apparently recent the neglect has been.
Our last stop was the Kyakhta City Museum. It’s an ordinary small-town history museum in most respects; the first floor greets visitors with the obligatory two-headed cow and dubious ethnography. Upstairs we saw items more instantly recognizable as “Kyakhta,” such as small teapots for tasting and scales. Seeing the luxurious European clothing, furniture, and handcrafts imported by the merchants also made it easier to understand the other sobriquet of Kyakhta–“the Paris of Siberia.” Finally an eclectic set of objects represented modern Kyakhta; I remember the glasnost and perestroika dress in particular. Don’t believe Kyakhta is a hollow shell of the city of millionaires, it seems to say–we’ve stayed up to date.
After the clipper ship made the Tea Road unprofitable, Russia started to import tea from Europe, rather than the other way round, and the economy of Kyakhta collapsed. It did remain a center of political power in the region, and to this day is a major border control checkpoint and thoroughfare. Standing at the Civil War memorial on a hill to the east of the city, we drew level with the guard towers. From there we looked below to the rubble of the barely-visible gostiny dvor and the dome of the church to its left, at this distance a silver dot. Then we turned our eyes out and away from the city, following the main highway until it vanished into the distance in Mongolia. No longer the “only city of millionaires in the world,” this is contemporary Kyakhta, ekeing out the same living guarding and trading that it always has.
Click Here for a View of Kyakhta from Above