Maybe but you have to consider the potential returns for expansion there. This is the same Russian empire which sold Alaska in 1867 because it was too expensive to maintain. It's a useless holding (before oil) if you don't also have interests in the western coast of NA. As a relevant tangent, we discovered that Qing control over Tibet was completely fake. They had no authority nor soldiers in that entire region in the 19th century and hadn't bothered to exercise their control for quite some time according to locals. Yet we didn't try to capture it because it wasn't worth the effort versus increasing control in India.

Russian empire was expanding everywhere, except the places where it could get fucked hard.

>>25593932 Parts of Central Asia were basically treated like satraps though, weren't they? Given the poor control China had over Tarim, and that it would be more difficult for e.g. the UK to intervene as they did in Iran or Afghanistan, Tarim seems like a good place to just try to vassalize locals without needing a ton of troops. The area also had a history of distinct polities which could make the notion of being largely autonomous vassals more appealing. >>25593943 China couldn't fuck Russia at that point. Maybe they'd be able to occupy Vladivostok or something for a while but they'd be ultimately incapable of marching west, or at least less able to do that than Russia would be of occupying Beijing, however unlikely that might be. The only real threat would be London and Paris intervening.

>>25593988 I think what you've said is probably what they did for places they didn't conquer. You do have to think about empire economically. The easier a place is to conquer usually implies that the place is dirt poor and unable to muster funds to defend itself. If it was a richer and more worthwhile place to conquer and exploit, then it would be a lot more difficult to force submission upon. I have no doubt that various places in Tartary were open for conquest. But the yields from these locations would have been so poor that it wasn't worth doing. Why do you think Qing control of these areas was relinquished over time? It wasn't making any money for them either.

>>25593988 >China couldn't fuck Russia at that point. It could get fucked by other great powers for such a bold try to eat a chink pie in one face