Russian research in late Imperial China; the case of Vladimir Obruchev's expedition to west China, 1892-1894

Following the growth of Russian political interests in Inner Asia in the mid-19th century, the Russian Imperial Geographical Society (RGS) initiated a series of extensive multi-disciplinary field studies of the region, including areas which now are part of the People's Republic of China. These expeditions aimed to provide the Russian government and academia with detailed information on the region's ethnographic, geological, botanical and other features and also to promote Russian science on an international level. One of the longest expeditions, in terms of both time and distance, was that of Vladimir Obruchev, the future renowned novelist and Soviet academician, who at that time was a young Siberian geologist. In the span of two years beginning in September 1892, he covered a distance of more than 15,000 kilometers inside China. He was inspired by the studies of Ferdinand von Richthofen on loess soils that are found only on the Chinese Loess Plateau. Utilizing the route description from Obruchev's memoir "From Kyakhta to Kuldzha" (1940), the original copies of his field report to the Russian Imperial Geographical Society (1900), and various materials from the archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the library of the Institute of Geography, and the archive of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, as well as Chinese databases and maps, the author made a detailed geographical and chronological reconstruction of the expedition route and itinerary on the modern map of China. More than 100 places have been identified and those points are available online as an interactive presentation. This contribution also presents a novel approach for studying the history of geographical exploration with all its complexity.