My dissertation Making Chinese Orthodox explored the Chinese Orthodox Church as a site of interaction between Russian and Chinese states. Page 99 comes at the end of the first full chapter, which examined the entanglement of multilingualism and religious confession in the first contact between Russian and Qing Chinese empires (17th-18th centuries). After 1720, at the end of this opening era, Qing texts began to refer to Russian Orthodox priests as lamas, a term otherwise reserved for Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist clerics. Prior to this, Orthodox Christianity was not distinguished from Catholicism. This change in nomenclature was never formally announced, but followed the conclusion of the Rites Controversy and its partial ban on Catholicism in Qing China. Russian Orthodox priests appear to have been quietly reclassified as lamas in order to exempt them from this ban. This special treatment emerged in the context of an emerging diplomatic system that provided for the regular rotation of Russians through Beijing. Page 99 elaborates what I argue is the reason for this shift:

a major motivation had to be the necessity of securing a renewable and controllable source of language contact to train interpreters and translators to work directly between Manchu and Russian. For the [1689 Treaty of] Nerchinsk generation, this work had been performed by native Russian speakers of the Russian Company.

            The Russian Company in the Qing’s Eight Banners organization was introduced earlier in the chapter. Originally a group of Siberian Cossacks who left Russia to enter Qing service, they subsequently became low-ranking hereditary members of the Qing’s Manchu elite. The normalization of Russian-Qing relations after 1689 and the first attempt to create a territorial border meant that these kinds of transfers were no longer officially permitted by either side. The Russian Company members’ intermarriage with other Eight Banner families in Beijing led to rapid language shift. Within a generation, members of the Russian Company did not speak or read Russian, though they retained nominal adherence to Orthodox Christianity along their patriline (as was the custom for Manchu family religion). A handful of Orthodox priests were dispatched from Russia on 10 year tours of duties to provide pastoral care for these Russian Company families – primarily life cycle ritual and annual festivals like Pascha (Easter).

Much like their designation as lamas, this pastoral care was partly pretext. The driving motive appears to have been to engineer situations of language contact and socialization. Why was it necessary to work directly between Manchu and Russian? Why not communicate in Mongolian, for instance, which was spoken and written by subjects in both empires? Neither the Russian nor Qing elites trusted Mongols, who retained a great deal of autonomy in this period. Instead, agents of both states sought to rely on kinds of persons whose social reproduction and personal survival were both dependent upon the state. A key tool in this regard was neglect. The salaries given to the Russian visitors in Beijing were woefully insufficient, so over a decade of poverty, Russian priests often found themselves moonlighting as assistants to the Qing’s Russian translators, as the translators’ job required a competence in Russian they did not possess and had no means to acquire. Surprisingly, this system served for generations as the engine of linguistic expertise enabling high-level official communication between the Russian and Qing empires, a diplomatic system that preserved peace between the two empires for the better part of two centuries. The simultaneously ad-hoc and complexly institutionalized character of these practices offer a helpful illustration of the seemingly paradoxical nature of imperial rule—a mix of autocratic will, bureaucratic precedent, and spontaneous self-organization that could be both homogenizing and diversifying at the same time.