Painting to the Chinese state

The author is the Siberian Cossack Ivan Petlin , a member of the embassy of the embassy and China (and Mongolia) in 1618-1619. Petlin’s detachment left Tomsk and reached Beijing through the Sayans and Mongolia. The text was preserved in two editions of Petlin: one of them was written in Tomsk somewhere from mid-May to early July 1619, the second from the words of Petlin in Moscow in the autumn of 1619. In the "Mural" the author talks about the nature of the places he saw, Buddhist monasteries. He drew attention to the Great Wall of China , the variety of goods, the innocence of the Chinese: "they are timid towards military affairs." Editions of the 19th century unreasonably attributed the authorship of the work to Burnash Yalychev , Ivan Petrov and Vasily Tyumenets ^[1] .

In addition to the “Mural,” the Petlin Embassy also made a drawing of the countries they saw, but it did not survive. In Russia of the 17th century, Petlin’s information was considered secret, therefore his text was not published. Merik sent a copy of the Mural, which was kept secret, to England. In 1625, the London publisher Samuel Perchas, in a book on geographical discoveries, published in English the documents of the Russian embassy in China, including part of the Petlin painting, under the general title “The narration of two Russian Cossacks traveling from Siberia to China and other countries adjacent to him. " Based on this publication, translations in Swedish and French were subsequently published. In 1628, the Mural was published in German and Latin in Frankfurt am Main . In 1692, excerpts from the Mural were published in the work of the Dutch geographer N. Witsen , Northern and Eastern Tataria . In 1707, a new edition of the Mural appeared in the Dutch city of Leiden , which stated that this was the first translation from the original language. In total, seven editions of the Mural were published outside of Russia from the 17th to the 18th centuries, and at the beginning of the 20th century, the Mural was published in English and Chinese.

In Russia, Petlin’s embassy was quickly forgotten: the original of the Mural was lost in the documents of the Ambassador’s order . So, in a letter from Alexei Mikhailovich in 1654 to the Qing emperor, it was reported: “And with your ancestors of the Chinese state with the tsar and you, the king, with a long distance, the great sovereigns of our ancestors and our father have blessed memories of the great there was no emperor of exile and love, and no ambassadors or envoys were sent. ” Russian historians of the 18th-19th centuries were forced to use the French edition of the Mural. In Russia, Petlin’s report was first published in 1818. Chronographs containing the text of the Mural distorted the initial data over time. This gave occasion to N. M. Karamzin to declare I. Petlin a plagiarist who had not been in China. This version in the XIX century was widespread in Russian and foreign literature, until it was disproved in 1882 by H. Trusevich, who discovered the original “Murals” ^[2] .