Pages From the Past: The 1910 Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia

The report of the Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia was published in Moscow by the main sponsor and organizer of the expedition, P.P. Riabushinskii. Traveling throughout northern and western Mongolia in the summer of 1910, the expedition gathered a wealth of information on trade routes, trading centers, the perceived threat to Russian trade posed by Chinese mercantile competition, and the daily lives of the Mongols, themselves.

This document ranks among the best travel accounts of Mongolia written by foreigners from the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. It gives the reader a minutely detailed account of Mongolia in its final years before autonomy (1911-1919) and revolution (1921) reordered the entire social, political, and economic landscape.

The seventy-three Moscow merchants who jointly underwrote the expedition s costs were in search of new export markets for Russian textiles and other manufactured products as well as scouting Mongolia as a source for unprocessed raw materials woolens, hides, and the like.