Siberia's Yenisei was written down as 'Kem' in 7th-century Chinese annals
The Yenisei is the biggest river system emptying into the Arctic Ocean, splitting the West Siberian Plain from the Central Siberian Plateau. Tang dynasty scribes recorded it more than a millennium ago, Dutch sailors knew it by 1600, and nobody can yet say for certain what its name means.
Ranked fifth-longest river system on Earth, the Yenisei starts from Mungaragiyn-gol in Mongolia and flows north through the Krasnoyarsk Dam to the Yenisei Gulf of the Kara Sea, its delta squeezed between the Gyda and Taymyr peninsulas. Measured from the meeting of the Great and Little Yenisei at Kyzyl, the main river runs 3,487 km; traced from the head of the Selenga, the total reaches 5,075 km. Its basin of about 2.58 million square kilometres takes in Lake Baikal, the world's deepest and oldest lake. The channel averages 14 m deep and plunges to 61 m.
Chinese contact with the Yenisei Kyrgyz produced the first written mention, as Kem, in the 7th century, with later Chinese histories using Jian and Qian for the same stream. That root survives in Tuvan xem and Tofa hem, both simply meaning river, and in more than 50 place-names ending in -kem in the Altai Republic. The modern name probably reached Russians from Samoyed-speaking neighbours after Cossacks from Tobolsk built Fort Mangazeya by around 1600. Linguist Max Vasmer linked it to Nganasan, Enets and Selkup words for the river, while other proposed meanings such as big river remain unconfirmed.
The basin, leaving aside Baikal, holds 55 native fish species, two found nowhere else, including a grayling confined to Khövsgöl Nuur. Siberian sturgeon, taimen and pike share the water. On land, Siberian pine and larch dominate, and Scots pine was plentiful around 6000 BC. The Taimyr reindeer herd, the world's largest, winters along the valley; it numbered roughly 800,000 to 850,000 in 2010 after topping a million. The 1.4-million-hectare Brekhovskie Islands in the estuary are a vital waterfowl nursery, and Fridtjof Nansen landed on the northeasternmost in 1913.
Steamers began arriving from the Netherlands and Britain across the icy Kara Sea in 1864. The Thames wintered there in 1876 and was wrecked, but the Frazer and Express succeeded in 1878, and one Yenisei boat, the St. Nicholas, carried the future Tsar Nicholas II and later took Lenin into exile. Captain Joseph Wiggins brought rails in the Orestes in 1893 for the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Source: Yenisei
