By it the frontier cities of Kiahta in Siberia, and Maimachen, facing it just across the line in Mongolia, were established as the gateway to Chinese trade. The treaty provided for the extradition of bandits and for a perpetual peace and friendship between the high contracting parties. Ever since, the citizens of Kiahta have alternately blessed and blamed Ragusinsky,--blamed him because, in the fear lest any stream flowing out of Chinese into Russian territory should be poisoned, he settled the boundary city beside a Siberian brook so inadequate that Kiahtans have suffered ever since for lack of water, with the river Bura only nine versts away in China; blessed him because of the great prosperity the treaty brought to their doors. The tea carried by this highway became Russia’s national drink. Great warehouses arose, built caravansary-wise around courts. Endless files of two-wheeled carts rolled northward, bearing each its ten square bales of tea, or its well-packed bolts of silk. The merchants grew wealthy in the rapidly swelling trade. A great Chinese embassy, headed by the third ranking official of the Peking Foreign Office, made its way to Moscow to keep permanent the relations of the two empires. Similarly, a Russian embassy was established in the rebuilt compound in Peking, where a new church arose, whose archimandrite gained a comfortable revenue by selling ikons and crucifixes to the many Chinese converts he had baptized. Catherine the Second’s edict opened to all Russians the freedom of Chinese trade. Its volume, large before, became now even greater. In 1780 the registered commerce at Kiahta had risen to 2,868,333 roubles, not to mention the large value of the goods taken in unregistered. Tea, a pound of which, if of best quality, cost two roubles in those days, silks, porcelains, cottons, and tobacco, went north, exchanged for Russian peltries, for cloth, hardware, and, curiously enough, hunting-dogs. An English merchant, who had penetrated to Kiahta in that year, gives an amusing account of the mutual distrust with which the barter was conducted. The Russian going over the frontier to Maimachen would examine the goods in the Chinese warehouse, seal up what he desired, and leave two men on guard. The Chinese merchant would then come to Kiahta, and do the same with the Russian’s wares. When the bargain was struck, both together carried one shipment over the border with guards and brought back the exchange. In growing prosperity, undisturbed, the Kiahta caravans came and went, while elsewhere history was warm in the making.