The article offers a critical analysis of the representation of the imperial gaze in Victorian travel writing, focusing on the Siberian chapters of John Sheepshanks’ travelogue My Life in Mongolia and Siberia (1903). Drawing upon imagology and Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the "contact zone," the study examines the mediated structure of interethnic encounter along the 1867 route (Kiakhta—Selenga—Posolsky). Through a close reading of the author’s communicative breakdowns—including language barriers, the actions of the Cossack escort, intermediary figures of political exiles, and the deployment of Latin as a socio-clerical code—the authors demonstrate that the traveller’s perception of the host culture was entirely contingent upon local mediators. The stark contrast between the pastoral continuity of the Mongolian chapters and the discontinuous, fragmented nature of the Siberian sequence is read as a forced shift in narrative and observational strategies. Ultimately, the article reveals that, contrary to deep-seated Western stereotypes of Siberia as an "empty, wild space," the travelogue registers it as an overregulated institutional environment. Within this space, the British author’s investigative autonomy is severely constrained, while the voices of local populations are consistently pushed to the periphery of the imperial archive.

Keywords: John Sheepshanks, My Life in Mongolia and Siberia, Siberia, travel writing, mediators, language, contact zone