It provided for the return to China of the eastern part of the Ili Basin region, also known as Zhetysu, which had been occupied by Russia since 1871 during the Dungan Revolt.
The residents of the area would be allowed by Article 3 to stay or to move to Russia and would be asked about their choice before the withdrawal of the Russian troops.
Article 10 allowed Russia to expand its consular network in the northwestern parts of the Chinese Empire (Xinjiang, Gansu, and Outer Mongolia).
In Kobdo (Khovd), Uliasutai (Uliastai), Hami (Kumul), Urumqi, and Gucheng (Qitai), Russia would be allowed to establish consulates later, as would be required by the volume of trade.
The Treaty of Saint Petersburg was perceived as a huge loss and step backward by many in Russia, such as by Minister of War Dmitry Milyutin and the notable military commander Aleksei Brusilov.
[6] Several thousand Dungan (Hui) and Taranchi (Uyghur) families made use of the treaty to move to Russian-controlled territory, today's south-eastern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan.
Historian Edward L. Dreyer stated, "China's nineteenth-century humiliations were strongly related to her weakness and failure at sea.
At the start of the Opium War, China had no unified navy and no sense of how vulnerable she was to attack from the sea; British forces sailed and steamed wherever they wanted to go....
Meanwhile, new if not exactly modern Chinese armies suppressed the midcentury rebellions, bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, and defeated the French forces on land in the Sino-French War (1884-85).
But the defeat of the fleet, and the resulting threat to steamship traffic to Taiwan, forced China to conclude peace on unfavorable terms.
Mass media in the West then portrayed China as a rising military power because of its modernization programs and as a major threat to the Western world.
[9] British observer Demetrius Charles de Kavanagh Boulger proposed an Anglo-Chinese alliance to check Russian expansionism in Central Asia.