# The tsar’s envoy to the Emperor of China was a Moldavian. He spent the summer arguing about how to bow

*Nicolae Milescu in Beijing, 1675–1678*

In 1675 Tsar Alexei sent Nicolae Milescu, a boyar who had fled Moldavia and become a translator in Moscow, to Beijing. He covered almost 8,000 kilometres across Siberia and reached Beijing in May 1676. He bowed to the Kangxi Emperor, but not the way the mandarins wanted. He refused to receive the emperor’s gifts on his knees or to accept a letter that treated the tsar as a vassal, so he went home without it. By then the tsar who had sent him was dead.

Marius Comper · 17 September 2026

## From Vaslui to Beijing

The map follows Milescu’s journeys as you read. The solid line runs through the places named in his diary and reports. The dotted line joins places he is known to have been, along roads he did not describe.

Russian documents are dated in the Julian calendar, which in the 17th century ran ten days behind the calendar of Catholic Europe. Dates in the chapters are those of the documents.

## I. Moldavia

*c. 1636 – 1664 · boyar, princely secretary, then fugitive*

- When: up to age 28
- On the map: not measured
- One detail: translated the Bible from Greek

Nicolae Milescu was born around 1636 near Vaslui, into a boyar family, and studied in Constantinople under the Greek teacher Gavriil Vlasios. The Russian biographical dictionary of 1909 credits him with ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Slavonic, Russian and Italian.

By about 1660 he was secretary to Ștefăniță Lupu, prince of Moldavia. What happened next is known mostly from a story told by the chronicler Ion Neculce, written more than half a century later in a collection of “sayings heard from one man to another”: Milescu is said to have written secretly to a former prince of Wallachia, Constantin Șerban, urging him to come with an army and depose Ștefăniță, and to have sent the letters inside a hollowed-out stick. Constantin Șerban sent the stick on to Ștefăniță, and Ștefăniță had the executioner cut off Milescu’s nose with the prince’s own dagger.

The cut nose also appears in the Frenchman La Neuville, who met Milescu in Moscow in 1689, but with a different cause: that he had betrayed a secret treaty between the prince of Wallachia and Poland to the sultan. Two writers say, each in his own way, that his nose had been cut, and one of them knew him. The cause differs between the two, and neither wrote in the years of the event. Neculce calls him Nicolai Cârnul, “the snub-nosed”.

He went to Constantinople as the agent of the prince of Wallachia, Grigore Ghica. There he translated the Bible from Greek; according to the French historian Émile Picot, his translation was the basis of the Bible printed in Bucharest in 1688, which does not name him. In 1664 Grigore Ghica lost his throne after his dealings with the Poles reached the sultan, and Milescu, who had denounced him to the sultan, had to leave the Ottoman Empire.

**Meanwhile:** In February 1661, in Beijing, a boy not yet seven came to the throne as the Kangxi Emperor. Fifteen years later Milescu would stand before him.

## II. Exile

*1664 – 1675 · a fugitive at Europe’s courts, then a translator in Moscow*

- When: 11 years
- On the map: not measured
- One detail: “a man so close to Tartary, so learned in languages”

The Elector of Brandenburg received him well in Berlin, and doctors there repaired his nose as far as they could. The Elector threw him out when the King of Poland wrote to tell him what kind of man he was sheltering. Milescu moved to Stettin, to another exiled prince of Moldavia, Gheorghe Ștefan, who sent him as his agent to Stockholm.

In Stockholm the French ambassador, Simon Arnauld de Pomponne, was looking for someone to explain what the Greek Church believed about the Eucharist. Milescu wrote him a treatise in Greek and Latin in February 1667. Pomponne told the theologians of Port-Royal he had been surprised to find “a man so close to Tartary so learned in languages”, who came to Mass at his house on every feast day and differed from a Catholic only over the Creed.

After Gheorghe Ștefan died in 1668, Milescu went back to Moldavia and then to Constantinople, where Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, recommended him to the tsar as a man “like a chronograph, containing all the affairs of the world”. He left Adrianople on 1 March 1671, through Hungary and Poland, and entered Moscow on 3 June with three servants.

Moscow received him with suspicion and asked for information about him; the answer came back that he was “a traitor, a spy of the Turkish sultan”. The boyar Artamon Matveev took him under his protection all the same, and in December 1672 Milescu became a translator at the Ambassadorial Office, from Greek, Latin and “Wallachian”, on 100 roubles a year. He wrote books for the tsar on history, prophecy and numbers, and taught Matveev’s son.

**Meanwhile:** In 1673 the Revolt of the Three Feudatories broke out in southern China, a war still going on when Milescu reached Beijing.

## III. Western Siberia

*March – July 1675 · the tsar’s envoy, on the Irtysh, the Ob and the Ket*

- When: 4 months
- On the map: 3,600 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: night at Samarovo: “barely 5 hours, and even that light”

Tsar Alexei wanted trade with China, Chinese silver, a shorter route, Chinese merchants in Moscow and an agreement on titles and on the language of letters. He also wanted to know what was in four Chinese letters sent to Moscow over the years, which Moscow wanted translated. On 4 March 1675 Milescu left Moscow with two clerks and two Greeks.

In Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, he stayed five weeks. Living there in exile was the Croatian scholar Juraj Križanić, who had gathered information about the roads to China and later recalled that in all that time Milescu “ate not one dinner or supper without me”. On 3 May he set off down the Irtysh on three flat-bottomed boats, with Cossacks, a priest and six gyrfalcons for the emperor.

On 10 May he wrote to the tsar from Samarovo, near where the Irtysh flows into the Ob: the river was “as wide and deep as the Danube”, and the night lasted “barely 5 hours, and even that light”. Geographers, he wrote, put the border between Europe and Asia on the Ob, “and I, your slave, now leaving Europe on my left, to the west, sail into Asia on my right, to the east”.

On the Ob he was caught by “ice floes as big as mountains”, and the boats sheltered against the bank behind logs. In his diary Milescu notes that the Greek and Latin geographers say nothing of the Irtysh, a river “as great and famous as the Danube”, “so that it has no name”, and that about the lands between the Volga and China they wrote “only fables, having heard only rumours”. Up the Ket he turned east and reached Yeniseisk in July.

**Meanwhile:** That same spring Križanić, in exile at Tobolsk for 14 years, was waiting for a pardon. The new tsar freed him in March 1676.

## IV. Baikal

*July – December 1675 · up the Angara, across Baikal and over the steppe*

- When: 5 months
- On the map: 2,400 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: Baikal may be called a sea “even by an envious geographer”

On 18 July he left Yeniseisk along the Yenisei and the Angara, which the Russians then called the Tunguska, and through its rapids. On 11 September he reached Baikal, where the Angara pours out of the lake “with great speed”.

Of Baikal he writes that “neither the old geographers nor those of today” mention it, though they describe smaller lakes and marshes. It may be called a lake, since its water is fresh, but also a sea, “even by an envious geographer”, since a sailing ship takes ten or twelve days to cross its length.

He crossed to the mouth of the Selenga and from there went over the steppe, by a new road nobody had tried before. Four days from Nerchinsk he was met by Cossacks who warned him that the Buryats had just driven off about a thousand horses and a Cossack from under the fort. He entered Nerchinsk on 4 December.

The Tungus were waiting there, and thanked the tsar for the embassy. Among them was Prince Gantimur, who had fled Chinese rule in 1667 and whom Beijing had been demanding back for years. Milescu's instructions were to assure him of the tsar's protection.

## V. The border

*December 1675 – May 1676 · waiting on the Nen river*

- When: 5 months
- On the map: 700 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: at the Argun they sewed shoes for the horses

On 19 December he left Nerchinsk southwards across the steppe, with no road. On 29 December, at the Argun river, he stopped for a whole day because, from cold and poor grazing, “many horses and camels went lame, and they sewed them shoes”.

Around the middle of January he crossed into land held by China, and on 26 January he reached a border post on the Nen river. He waited almost a month. He had sent a man ahead from Yeniseisk to announce the embassy in Beijing; they had kept him under guard there for a month.

On 20 February an official arrived from Beijing. The quarrel began before a word was exchanged: for seven days they argued where to meet and who should enter first. They settled on a yurt pitched next to Milescu’s lodging, which the Chinese entered before him. The official asked for the tsar’s letter; Milescu replied that he would give it to no one but the emperor.

The emperor ordered him brought to Beijing “with great honour”. On 10 May 1676 Milescu reached the Great Wall.

**Meanwhile:** At the end of January 1676, around the time Milescu reached the Nen, Tsar Alexei died in Moscow, aged 46. Milescu was carrying a dead man’s letter to Beijing.

## VI. Beijing

*May – September 1676 · at the court of the Kangxi Emperor*

- When: 3½ months
- On the map: 1,100 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: “You are the bogdykhan’s slaves and know how to bow”

On 15 May 1676 he entered Beijing and learned that the emperor did not take letters from the hands of envoys. “What proud customs, against the law of all nations!” Milescu told the mandarins. They explained that long ago an envoy had brought a letter insulting the emperor, and since then letters were read before the envoy was received: “As hair grows on the head and turns grey and cannot be changed back, so our custom cannot be changed.”

Their interpreter was a Flemish Jesuit, Ferdinand Verbiest, the court astronomer, who spoke to Milescu in Latin. In private Verbiest warned him that the Chinese called other countries’ gifts tribute and wrote to foreign kings as a master to a servant, and that they say “all the people in the world see with one eye, and only they, the Chinese, with two”. The envoy’s house was locked and guarded. The heat was heavy, half the men fell ill from the heat and the bad water, and the guards sold them food at three times the price.

After three weeks they agreed: on 5 June Milescu carried the tsar’s letter and gifts to the palace and left them on the emperor’s seat. That same day the dynasty’s official chronicle recorded that the king of the Russians “brings tribute”: his country is far away, does not know Chinese writing or forms of address, and “now wishes to send tribute envoys”.

At the audience on 16 July, a date only the Russian biographical dictionary gives, the mandarins prostrated themselves at the sound of a bell and a drum. Milescu bowed “quickly and not to the ground”, and when they told him to do as they did he replied: “You are the bogdykhan’s slaves and know how to bow; we are not his slaves, and we bow as we know how.” When they told him to run towards the throne, as custom required, he said “running is not my custom” and walked slowly. Before the emperor he bowed once to the ground and sat on a cushion about 17 metres from the throne. The emperor, a young man of 22, said nothing to him.

At the second audience he bowed ten times and knelt when the Jesuits brought him the emperor’s questions: whether the tsar was well, how old he was, whether the envoy had studied philosophy, mathematics and trigonometry. Milescu answered that he had left the tsar “in good health”. The tsar had been dead for more than five months.

On 13 August he was told to receive the emperor’s gifts on his knees in the mud of the courtyard; he received them standing, after a whole day of arguments, without food or water. On 29 August he knelt for more than two hours in a downpour while the court’s replies were read to him: the emperor’s letter would come “from the highest throne to the low and humble place”, and the tsar’s gifts were tribute. Milescu said that had he known, he would neither have given nor accepted gifts, and would not accept a letter written that way. He left Beijing on 1 September without the emperor’s letter.

What the court in Beijing wrote, July 1676:

- 尼果賴: Nikolai, the envoy of the Russians
- 不嫻典禮: “does not know the rites”
- 不便給與敕書: “it is not fitting to give him an imperial letter”
- 根忒木爾: Gantimur, whom Russia must return

**Meanwhile:** On 30 July 1676, or 9 August in the Gregorian calendar, the emperor’s council decided what Milescu was to be told: Russia must hand over Gantimur and send another envoy who would follow Chinese ceremony. Only then would trade go on.

## VII. The return

*September 1676 – 1708 · back to Moscow, tried and cleared*

- When: away 2 years and 10 months
- On the map: 7,500 km (at least, through the places named)
- One detail: a book on China in 59 chapters

On the way back the Chinese held him for ten days on the Nen, in poor yurts, in the rain. He wintered in Siberia and reached Yeniseisk in June 1677, where the governor inventoried his baggage on Moscow’s orders: his protector Matveev had fallen from favour after the tsar’s death.

He entered Moscow on 5 January 1678, after two years and ten months away and more than 15,000 kilometres on the map, there and back. He was put on trial: for exceeding his orders over Gantimur, for giving the emperor poor furs and selling the good ones, for taking bribes. He answered point by point and was cleared, and in 1683 the tsar rewarded him “for the mission to China”.

He wrote a description of China in 59 chapters, finished in November 1678, and a description of the Amur river. In 1689 Russia and China signed a border treaty at Nerchinsk. That same year the Frenchman La Neuville met him in Moscow and found him “very guarded” when asked about the road to China, afraid of being punished for giving away a secret. Milescu died in Moscow around 1708.

## In his own words

Milescu kept a diary of the road through Siberia and wrote reports to the tsar. The quotations are translated from Russian; those from Beijing are reproduced by the historian Sergei Solovyov, who used the embassy's papers.

**The Irtysh.** “Though it is a river as great and famous as the Danube, the geographers, out of ignorance, make no mention of it at all, so that it has no name.” (Diary, at Tobolsk, 1675)

**Siberia.** “And whoever wrote anything about [these lands] wrote only fables, having heard only rumours, for no one skilled had ever been there.” (Diary, 1675)

**The Ob.** “And I, your slave, now leaving Europe on my left, to the west, sail into Asia on my right, to the east, up the Ob against the current.” (Report to the tsar, Samarovo, 10 May 1675)

**Baikal.** “Even an envious geographer may call it a sea, since a large sailing ship takes ten or twelve days and more to cross its length.” (Diary, September 1675)

**The bow.** “You are the bogdykhan’s slaves and know how to bow; we are not his slaves, and we bow as we know how.” (Beijing report, July 1676, via Solovyov)

**The merchants.** “In trade there are no people so cunning in all the world. If you are not careful, they will cut the buttons off your coat.” (Beijing report, 1676, via Solovyov)

## Document or legend?

Much has been said about Milescu, some of it in the embassy’s papers, some in stories written after his death. For each statement, guess whether it comes from a document of the time or from a later legend.

1. After his nose was cut off, a German doctor made it grow back. *Legend. Neculce tells it, more than half a century later: the doctor kept letting blood from his face until the nose “grew back”. The Russian biographical dictionary says only that doctors in Brandenburg repaired it.*
2. In front of the mandarins, he bowed “quickly and not to the ground”. *Document. That is what his Beijing report says, as quoted by Solovyov. Before the throne, though, he bowed to the ground.*
3. He taught Peter the Great to read. *Legend. Neculce says so. When Milescu left for China, Peter was not yet three. His documented pupil was Artamon Matveev’s son.*
4. The court in Beijing wrote that he “does not know the rites”. *Document. The official chronicle of the Qing dynasty, July 1676: 不嫻典禮, and therefore “it is not fitting to give him an imperial letter”.*
5. The emperor gave him a diamond “like a pigeon’s egg”. *Legend. The diamond is in Neculce. The papers say Milescu bought a large red stone in Beijing for the tsar’s treasury, worth about 2,672 roubles.*
6. He received the emperor’s gifts standing, although he was told to kneel. *Document. On 13 August 1676, after a whole day of arguments. Two weeks later, though, he did kneel in the rain to hear the court’s replies.*
7. On his return he was exiled to Siberia until Peter the Great called him back. *Legend. Neculce tells of the exile and the recall. The papers show a trial in Moscow in 1678, which he survived, and a reward from the tsar in 1683.*
8. The Kangxi Emperor asked him whether he had studied philosophy, mathematics and trigonometry. *Document. The question was passed to him through the Jesuits at the second audience. Kangxi was himself learning trigonometry and astronomy from the Jesuits.*

## Three calendars, one day

Moscow counted days in the Julian calendar, Catholic Europe in the Gregorian, Beijing in lunar months and a 60-day cycle. The same two days in the summer of 1676, in all three.

| | Moscow (Julian) | Europe (Gregorian) | Beijing (Qing) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Milescu leaves the tsar’s letter at the palace; the court records it as tribute. | 5 June 1676 | 15 June 1676 | 康熙十五年五月 丙戌 (day 5 of the month) |
| The court decides: no imperial letter until Gantimur is handed over. | 30 July 1676 | 9 August 1676 | 康熙十五年七月 辛巳 (day 1 of the month) |

The chronicle gives the day by its sign in the 60-day cycle. Counting from the first day of the month, 丙戌 falls on 15 June 1676, exactly the day the Russian papers call 5 June.

## Sources and method

The road through Siberia comes from Milescu’s diary and his reports to the tsar, published by Yuri Arseniev in 1882. The Beijing episode comes from the embassy report, known here through the summary and quotations of the historian Sergei Solovyov and through the Russian biographical dictionary of 1909; the 1906 edition of the report and John Baddeley’s 1919 English translation could not be consulted. The Chinese side comes from the official chronicle of the Kangxi reign. His life before Russia comes from Émile Picot’s study (1883) and, for the legends, from Ion Neculce.

Distances are measured on the map through the places named in the documents; on dotted stretches, only between those places. The real road was longer. Russian dates are in the Julian calendar; Chinese dates were converted day by day. All quotations are our own translations.

### Written by Milescu

- [N. Spafary, *Путешествие чрез Сибирь от Тобольска до Нерчинска и границ Китая*, ed. Yu. V. Arseniev, St Petersburg, 1882, part 1 (Tobolsk, Irtysh)](https://www.vostlit.info/Texts/rus15/Spapharij/text1.phtml?id=1755)
- [Same, part 2 (Ob, Yenisei)](https://www.vostlit.info/Texts/rus15/Spapharij/text2.phtml?id=1756)
- [Same, part 3 (Angara, Baikal, Nerchinsk, Argun)](https://www.vostlit.info/Texts/rus15/Spapharij/text3.phtml?id=1757)
- [Same, appendix 2: reports to the tsar from Tobolsk, Samarovo, Surgut, Narym, Yeniseisk, Selenga and Nerchinsk](https://www.vostlit.info/Texts/rus15/Spapharij/pril2.phtml?id=1759)

### Beijing

- [S. M. Solovyov, *История России с древнейших времён*, vol. XII, ch. V (summary and quotations of the Beijing report)](https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/История_России_с_древнейших_времён_(Соловьёв)/Том_XII/Глава_V)
- [V. Fursenko, “Спафари Милеску, Николай Гаврилович”, *Russian Biographical Dictionary*, 1909](https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/РБС/ВТ/Спафари_Милеску,_Николай_Гаврилович)
- [聖祖仁皇帝實錄 (Veritable Records of the Kangxi reign), juan 60 (5th month, Kangxi 15: the Russian “tribute”)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/康熙朝實錄/卷之60)
- [Same, juan 61 (7th month: the decision on the envoy and Gantimur)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/康熙朝實錄/卷之61)
- [B. G. Kurts, *Русско-китайские сношения в XVI, XVII и XVIII столетиях*, Kharkiv, 1929 (the refused letter)](https://archive.org/details/kurtsbgrusskokitajskiesnoshenijavxvi0)

### Life and legend

- [É. Picot, *Notice biographique et bibliographique sur Nicolas Spatar Milescu*, Paris, 1883 (with Pomponne’s letter and La Neuville’s account)](https://archive.org/details/noticebiographiq00pico)
- [Ion Neculce, *O samă de cuvinte*, legend XLI (Romanian)](https://ro.wikisource.org/wiki/Letopisețul_Țării_Moldovei/O_samă_de_cuvinte)

### Context

- [“Алексей Михайлович”, *Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedia* (the tsar’s death, 1676)](https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/ЭСБЕ/Алексей_Михайлович)
- [Wikipedia, “Kangxi Emperor” (born 1654, reigned from 1661)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Emperor)
- [Wikipedia, “Peter the Great” (born 1672)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great)
- [Wikipedia, “Juraj Križanić” (exile in Tobolsk, 1661–1676)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juraj_Križanić)
- [Wikipedia, “Revolt of the Three Feudatories” (1673–1681)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Three_Feudatories)
- [Wikipedia, “Treaty of Nerchinsk” (1689)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nerchinsk)

### The map

- [Natural Earth, 1:50m layers (public domain)](https://www.naturalearthdata.com/)

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A project by [Marius Comper](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/) · https://mariuscomper.uk/milescu-in-china/en/