Yury Golovkin

[citation needed] The Russian Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, had been preparing a mission to China for several years, partly in response to the growing Napoleonic hold over Europe, which left Russia with few possibilities for expansion.

In Urga, in bitterly cold weather, the entire company were invited to attend an open-air reception at which they were expected to perform the kowtow before a table on which stood a wooden tablet and three candles.

[8] For the post-war period that may largely be due to the enforced sensitivities of Soviet scholars to the delicacy of Sino-Soviet relations, for, as one of them put it in 1959, it was all a question of the penetration and exploitation of the Chinese market, and that was hardly a friendly act.

Filipp Vigel’, whose reminiscences are a valuable source for the workings of Russian upper-class society in the nineteenth-century, recorded that the prospect of travelling to China excited much interest; his own motives for participating were, however, somewhat mercenary, for he was short of money and it was only through his influential connections that he was able to land himself with a well-paid position on the embassy in a clerical capacity.

Potocki's leadership of the scientific team was not simply a matter of his personal connections with the fellow Pole, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, for his intellectual and political credentials for fulfilling that role were impeccable, and without him it is unlikely that the brilliant German orientalist, Julius Klaproth, would have had any part to play in the mission.