The Real Siberia: Gold

In 1901, British Journalist John Foster Fraser travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok, and back again, mostly by rail. On his return, he recorded his experiences (and prejudices) in “The Real Siberia”.

In today’s excerpt, Fraser learns a little about the Siberian gold industry:

Irkutsk is in the middle of the gold district, stretching far down the banks of the Lena, far into the mountains of Trans-Baikal, and also among the fastnesses bordering Mongolia, only a hundred miles away. The law is being modified, but till recently all the gold from mines in East Siberia had to pass through the Government Laboratory at Irkutsk. Only about half of it did. Even then six hundred million roubles worth of gold passed through in the last thirty years - that is 1,173,456 pounds avoirdupois of gold.

There are stacks of yellow ingots at the Irkutsk Laboratory that would make the mouths of Bank of England directors water. Two old men guard it at night. A force of Cossacks formerly guarded the gold. But one evening they marched off with the lot. Thereupon the mind of the Russian authorities went to work. Their reasoning was thus: “It is dangerous to have a body of stalwart fellows on guard, for they might up and away with the gold any hour. It would be much better to have two old men who couldn’t carry a bar between them.” The possibility of these two being hit on the head some night with a mallet was lost sight of.

The other half of the gold has been squandered in riotous living. If you are a miner, and have stolen gold, you must dispose of it somehow. In side streets are greasy, blue-bloused Chinamen, ostensibly dealers in tea. Though never a cake of tea enters their stores, they grow rich. Their enemies say they buy the stolen gold.

How to get gold out of Russian territory without discovery requires cuteness. But the ways of the Chinaman have become poetically proverbial. Even Chinamen die. And a dead Chinaman must sleep his long sleep in his native land. So his good brother Chinamen in Irkutsk embalm him, and put him in a box, and burn candles over him, and send him away to rest with his fathers.

Peeping through a, keyhole at an embalming operation not long ago, the Irkutsk police saw gold dust blown through a tube up the nostrils into the empty skull. So they discovered why the Chinese were so anxious to give the soul of their dead brother peace by burial at home. His head was to serve as carrier of gold till he reached the Flowery Land, and then the dust was to be extracted.

This post is one of a series of excerpts from John Foster Fraser’s “The Real Siberia”. Further excerpts can be found in the Siberian Light archive.

The full text of The Real Siberia is available online at Friends & Partners.

Tagged as: The Real Siberia