A Sad Tale About Arthur Cassini, Imperial Russian Ambassador to China (1891-1896)

Posted: December 17th, 2022 | No Comments »

Count Arthur Cassini was a legendary Russian ambassador (his family had Italian roots) to China in the late nineteenth century. He was ambassador at a fascinating and rocky time in Sino-Russian relations – The Triple Intervention, the negotiation for the Russian lease over Port Arthur (Lushun), and of course the Russo-Japanese War. But I had never really followed what happened to him after he left China and moved on.

I’m currently reading Helen Rappaport’s excellent After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris Between the Wars. Rapport has the sad story of Cassini after the 1917 Russian Revolution when he was in exile in Paris. Stephen Bonsal, an American journalist, war correspondent, author, diplomat, and translator, was in Paris for the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 and noted, in his memoir Suitors and Supplicants, the despondent Russians on the streets . Among them:

‘I saw Count Cassini, so long ambassador extraordinary of Holy Russia, running through the sleet and rain on the Place de la Madeleine to catch a bus to take him to the modest suburban retreat, or refuge, with which the French government has provided him.’

Bonsal remembered that the last time he had encountered Cassini was back in 1896 when he had been ‘lording it over all China’,

‘When he moved through the streets of Peking, sotnias* of Cossacks dashed ahead and cleared the way for the little man with the monocle who over four years, with the dreaded power of Russian behind him, dominated four hundred million Chinese and made them do his bidding.’

Cassini died in Paris later in 1919 at age 83.

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