Steam the Tea: The Sino-Russian Tea Trade in Late 19th-Century Hankou and Tianjin

During the nineteenth century, the growing demand for Chinese brick tea led Russian merchants to actively engage in the Sino-Russian tea trade. Beginning in 1861, following the Qing government’s decision to open treaty ports to international trade, Russian merchants, who had previously been restricted to trading tea only in the border city of Kyakhta, crossed the northern Chinese border and established trading networks centered around the treaty ports of Hankou and Tianjin. Hankou was close to the tea-producing regions of Hubei and Hunan, while Tianjin served as a key transitional hub and the nearest major port to Kyakhta.

Over three generations, Russian merchants established an extensive trading network that connected the treaty ports of Hankou and Tianjin with Kyakhta, integrating the traditional border market into a broader production and distribution system within China. Despite facing challenges such as domestic turmoil in China, imperialist rivalries, and intense competition among merchant communities, the Sino-Russian trading network exhibited remarkable stability and efficiency. The evolving trade patterns redefined power dynamics between Chinese and Russian merchants and reshaped Sino-Russian commercial relations. This new development in commercial relations also raises further critical questions: How did Sino-Russian trade continue to expand amid international instability? Why did Chinese merchant guilds and the Qing government choose not to intervene? In what ways did this enduring trade influence the development of treaty ports and cross-border economic interactions?

Using Chinese customs reports, local gazetteers, newspapers, records of foreign companies, and Russian family history materials, this study employs a microhistory approach to examine the roles of Russian merchants, Chinese tea merchants, and compradors. This research reveals the complexity of late nineteenth-century Sino-Russian relations during a transformative period by situating individual merchants within the broader contexts of multi-imperial politics and semi-colonial urbanization.