Chenqing

Chenqing lies in the middle Amur country, in the forested hills and river plains around the Bureya and the Little Khingan, within the broad historical region known in English as Manchuria and in China as the Northeast. The Amur and its tributaries made this country a corridor of movement, with river routes carrying people, furs and timber between the plains and the Pacific.

Its people were Tungusic and Mongolic hunters, fishers and herders, among them Evenk, Daur and Manegir communities, who came to pay fur tribute to the Qing in the seventeenth century. In 1650 a Cossack expedition under Yerofey Khabarov descended the Amur and built fortified posts, and the Qing answered by establishing the Heilongjiang General at Aigun in 1683. The Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 drew the frontier north of the river, leaving the Amur valley to the Qing, but the river kept linking small communities on both banks to the larger histories of the two empires.