Siberia was conquered by Russian-Turkic cossack gangs for a singular, purely economic reason: furs.
For Russia, the fur exports in the XVII century played about the same role as petroleum now. Toward the XVIII century, they gave Peter the Great the requisite funding for his wars against Swedes and Crimean Tatars that resulted in the rise of the Russian Empire.
For the Chinese, furs had no particular value, and there was little else that could motivate them to spend precious resources on controlling these vast, barren expanses to the north.
Besides, the Chinese didn’t possess the military technology for penetrating these territories. Cossacks, on the contrary, were ideal for the task. They were small, autonomous, highly mobile troops with firearms. They were able to combine constructing ad hoc river vessels for traveling longer distances on water with traversing the wilderness between watercourses on foot—the task seemingly impossible for the massive, cavalry-based Manchu troops.
Picture: a XIX-century watercolor by an anonymous artist visualizing Cossacks who collect fur taxes from a Siberian tribe
