winter months in bartering fur with the forest natives or wool with the inhabitants of the plateau steppes. But some of them have been tempted to make their abode in this wild country, and to live here all the year round, where not only can they trade in the winter, but can fish during the summer months in the rivers and lakes, and even themselves hunt for the cheaper furs. So they make rough log-huts and build their stores in suitable spots along the frontier, and even place them on what is nominally Chinese territory on the south of the artificial Russo-Chinese frontier. For by the provisions of one of the early Russo-Chinese treaties a fifty-verst (thirty-three-mile) neutral zone was allowed on either side of the Siberian-Mongolian frontier, where in the plateau forests and steppes the subjects of both nationalities are permitted to settle and trade unmolested. In forests the Siberian generally finds himself alone among the fur-hunting Finnish tribes. Here the whole country is open to him, and although much of it is nominally Chinese territory, no Chinese official is seen from one year to the other. He is, therefore, the only pioneer of trade and civilization in these parts. But on the frontier steppes he has to meet the Chinaman who comes in from the south to barter with the native Tartar and semi-Mongol tribes. The cosmopolitan population of these plateau steppes along the Siberian-Mongolian frontier is an interesting study for the traveller.
While I was travelling in the southern part of the Yenisei Government in the summer of 1910, after my experiences in the Siberian frontier village, I had occasion to visit the neutral zone along the
