China and Russia were originally thousands of miles apart and did not share a border. The reason why there are constant twists and turns in the later cutting and confusion is entirely the result of historical evolution.
Every Chinese learned from the history books when they were young that the territory of the Qing Dynasty at the peak of the unification of the whole country (1759) was: from the Mongolian Tangnu Wulianghai region and Siberia in the north, to the South China Sea in the south, to the Tawang region in Tibet in the southwest, the Nankan and Jiangxinpo areas in Yunnan Province, and other 18th-century Qing Dynasty and some tributary states in the north of Myanmar, west to the Aral Sea and the Onion Ridge region, northeast to the Outer Xing'an Mountains, including Sakhalin Island, southeast to Taiwan, Penghu Islands, including Taiwan and Penghu Islands. At its peak, it had a total area of more than 14 million square kilometers!
(Map of the Territory of the Qing Dynasty in the Qianlong Period)
Originally a principality under the mongol empire, Russia gradually split into several small khanates as the Mongol Empire was driven out of the Central Plains by Zhu Yuanzhang and returned to the desert north to graze cattle. Russia took advantage of the rise and annexed the territories conquered by the mongol empire, and after several generations of tsars, conquered the sparsely populated Siberia to the east, expanding its territory to 15.47 million square kilometers.
The god of history is about to have our two protagonists meet.
Around 1638, Russia began to expand southeastward from Yakutsk, established in the Ob River Valley, and soon reached the Heilongjiang River Basin. Here, china and Russia have made contact for the first time.
At that time, ethnic minorities living in the northeast lived here. They were all under the jurisdiction of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. However, at that time, the attention of the Qing Dynasty was focused on the conquest of the interior of the Central Plains, and the entire north was sparsely populated, in fact, there was no border defense.
The Russians burned and plundered everywhere, doing no evil, and gradually encroached on the south of the Heilongjiang River. The Qing Dynasty did not have a garrison in the Heilongjiang area, so the invasion of the Russian army was beyond reach. This has been going on for more than three decades. Twenty years after the Kangxi Dynasty, the entire Central Plains had been pacified, the San Francisco had been flattened, Taiwan had been recovered, and China's power was becoming more and more prosperous. At this time, the Kangxi Emperor finally made up his mind to solve the problem of the northern border.
From 1683 to 1686, the Qing Dynasty sent a large army to launch two consecutive battles of Yaksa, and finally defeated the main Russian army invading the northeast. At that time, the number of Russian troops was only 1,000 at the maximum, and the front-line strength of the Qing army reached more than 5,000 people, plus transportation and reserve troops, as many as tens of thousands, and they had obvious advantages in strength. At that time, the Qing army was fully capable of annihilating the Russian army, and it was even advisable to chase the remaining heroes and expand their power to Siberia. However, the Kangxi Emperor, who was deeply influenced by Confucianism, decided to stop at the right time, aiming to recover the lost land, and did not have the same expansionist heart as Russia. However, due to the limitation of its strength, Russia was finally unable to expand the war and forcibly occupied the Heilongjiang River Valley. Under such circumstances, the two sides began to sit down and negotiate.
On September 7, 1689, China and Russia signed the Treaty of Nebuchadnezzar. The treaty stipulates that China and Russia shall be bounded by the Gelbizi River, the Erguna River and the Trans-Xing'an Mountains, with Russia to the north and West to China, and china to the east and south. The nebuchu region west of the Erguna River, which originally belonged to China, was part of Russian territory. The city of Yaksa was owned by China, the Russian-built city was demolished, and the inhabitants were repatriated to Russia. After the two sides have made a treaty, they will allow mutual trade. In order to win back some face, the Russian side deliberately stirred up trouble in the ownership of the Uddi River Valley east of the Waixing'an Ridge to the sea, and finally made the Qing side agree to not delimit the boundary here first, and leave it for later discussion.
(The demarcation plan proposed by the representatives of the Nibu Chuqing government has been lost forever in the land that was once as far as the Arctic Ocean))
So we won a victorious battle, signed a land cession clause, and gave the Russians 3 million pieces of land north of heilongjiang and waixing'anling. This has a lot to do with the ignorance of the Qing government at that time, when the Qing government did not know the strength of this Siberian bear, and was directly frightened by the 1,000 Russian troops to sign a treaty, which has ensured peace.
From then on, the Russians knew that it was not a tiger that dominated the east, but a sick lion, and that the ambition to covet China's territory was breeding, and the greedy expansion of its minions continued to reach the Qing Dynasty in the western mountains of Nippon. Brief description of the territory after Kangxi's occupation by Russia:
In 1727, 38 years after the signing of the Treaty of Nebuchu, during the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, China and Russia signed the Treaty of Brentis and Kyakhta, which stipulated the middle boundary between the two countries. In these two treaties, because the Qing negotiators were ignorant of the actual situation of the border and were deceived by the russian map, the Chinese side suffered heavy losses, losing more than 300,000 square kilometers of land in the Angara River Valley south of Lake Baikal and north of Kyakhta.
In 1858, the Second Opium War broke out, and the British and French forces attacked the outskirts of Beijing and burned the Yuanmingyuan. The Qing court was very shocked, and the Xianfeng Emperor also ran to Rehe. At this time, Russia took the opportunity to intervene, pretending to help China mediate with Britain and France, and even threatened to deceive, forcing the Qing court to sign the Treaty of Yaohun, cutting off 600,000 square kilometers of land south of the Waixing'an Mountains and north of the Heilongjiang River, and allocating 400,000 square kilometers of land east of the Ussuri River, including Sakhalin Island, to the joint administration of the two countries. In fact, there were already a large number of Russian troops there at that time, and it was already under the control of Russia. In 1860, Russia again resorted to deception, in the name of withdrawing from Mediation with Britain and France, forcing the Qing court to sign the Treaty of Beijing with Russia, ceding all the so-called "condominium" lands east of the Ussuri River to Russia. Through these two treaties, Russia seized 1 million square kilometers of land from China without firing a single shot, equivalent to the area of France and Germany combined.
In 1864, Tsarist Russia took a hundred years to finally conquer the three Kazakh regimes, large, medium and small, and bordered China's northwestern border. Taking advantage of the civil unrest in China's Taiping Heavens, the Russian government forced the corrupt Qing Dynasty to sign the Treaty on surveying and dividing the Northwest Boundary with it under the threat of force. The covenant stipulates that the border line between China and Russia is marked by the permanent presence in Karen, that is, the border checkpoint. The map unilaterally delineated by Russia has gone far beyond the Chinese border of Karen and into the interior of Xinjiang. When the Qing negotiators objected, Russia actually sent a large army to expel the isolated Qing army Karen all the way to the Russian claimed border, arbitrarily seizing nearly 440,000 square kilometers of Land in China.
In 1865, Agubai, the leader of the Kokand Khanate in Central Asia, invaded Xinjiang and occupied many areas to prepare for his own. Russia immediately used this as an excuse to send troops to occupy the Ili region of Xinjiang, calling it the temporary "management" of the Qing Dynasty, in fact, it wanted to dismember Xinjiang together with Agubai. The Qing Dynasty showed great courage this time and sent Zuo Zongtang's army to Xinjiang to quell the rebellion. After several years of war, the Qing army finally crushed the Agubai invading army and recovered all the areas of Xinjiang except Ili. The Qing Dynasty also sent representatives to negotiate with Russia to reclaim Ili, and after arduous negotiations, the "Ili Treaty" was signed, and Tsarist Russia finally abandoned Ili, but cut off more than 40,000 square kilometers of land west of the Altai Mountains and the upper reaches of the Irtysh River from China. After the Treaty of Ili, Tsarist Russia signed several boundary survey protocols with the Qing Dynasty and cut off more than 30,000 square kilometers of land west of the Khorgos River in Xinjiang from China. In 1898, Russia forcibly occupied more than 20,000 square kilometers of land west of the Sarekol Ridge on the Pamir Plateau, taking most of the Pamir Plateau from China, causing the century-long problem of undefined Pamir.
In 1911, Russia took advantage of the Xinhai Revolution in China to instigate the upper maharajas of Outer Mongolia to declare independence and establish the Great Mongolian State. In 1945, with the intervention of the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia became officially independent. In this way, under the pressure of Soviet Russia, another 1.55 million square kilometers of territory broke away from China's embrace.
In addition, in 1914 Russia invaded 170,000 square kilometers of the Tangnu Ulyan Sea, the northernmost part of China, and soon came under Soviet control. Belonging to the Altai Mountains and the Irtysh River Valley, it is rich in resources and is inhabited by many Uyghur-speaking Wulianghai people. In 1944, Stalin incorporated the Donnu UlyanHai region into the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast of the Russian Federation.
From 1858 to 1945, former Tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, through armed aggression and diplomatic deception, directly seized 1.7 million square kilometers of land from China, coupled with the independence of Outer Mongolia instigated by it, a total of nearly 3.3 million square kilometers of land were separated from China's embrace, accounting for a quarter of the total territory of the Qing Dynasty in its heyday, of which Nebuchu ceded 3.3 million land to a total of 5 million directly into Russian hands. As a result, Russia has become the most vicious enemy in China's modern history. The cruel lessons of history prove that if a nation does not have an enterprising spirit, no matter how brilliant it has been, it cannot finally get rid of the fate of being slaughtered by a strong enemy.