My research entwines diplomatic and cultural history to show how early modern Muscovy understood and interacted with its eastern neighbours, as it sought to first discover, and then to understand, its Chinese rival. I use cultural historical methods to break through a field dominated by state-level histories of treaties and impersonal foreign affairs. Instead, I centre embodied and contextualised individuals as agents of state acts, and as both authors and performers of cultural values and narratives.  Additionally, I contend that the longstanding historiography of Russo-Chinese relations is undermined by its neglect of indigenous or local Eurasian communities, who, whether in the form of tributary Siberian communities or semi-nomadic Mongol polities, were a constant and unyieldingly important presence in both the Muscovite and the Qing Chinese frontier. From this position, established historiographical conclusions about the ‘failures’ of diplomacy, communication, and understanding in the course of Russian diplomatic overtures in the seventeenth century become insufficient, and a new critical perspective on a key period in the formation of the Russian Empire comes into view.