To the Chekhovs, 29 June 1890. Pod Khabarovkoy, parokhod "Muravyev".

addressed to Chekhov’s sister Maria Pavlovna ("Masha") and written aboard the steamer "Muravyov" on the Amur, just below (south of) Khabarovka (modern Khabarovsk), on 29 June 1890, the day after the telegram to their father preserved in this corpus as (sent from Radde, 28 June). The two documents sit back to back in the sequence: the telegram is a four-word wire scraped for a name-day greeting; this letter is a longer, unhurried dispatch written the next day on the same river, and it in fact refers back to that telegram directly ("Last night I sent Father in Sumy a congratulatory telegram. Did you get it?"), confirming both the dating and the itinerary. Chekhov was partway through the overland and river crossing of Siberia he had begun that April, en route to Sakhalin Island for his one-man census of the penal colony; the family was summering at the Lintvaryovs’ estate near Sumy, in Kharkov province, hence the letter’s closing address.

The letter is observational and lightly comic, in the register of Chekhov’s Siberian travel correspondence generally: cabin "meteors" that turn out to be luminous beetles, wild goats swimming the Amur, oversized flies, a fellow passenger’s opium binge, a walk through the Chinese town of Aigun (Aihui) on the 27th. The recurring figure is a Chinese cabin-mate named Son-Lyuli (Сон-Люли), who tells Chekhov that in China even a trivial offense can cost a man his head, gets heavily intoxicated on opium and keeps Chekhov awake, and later sings from notation written on his own fan – a small, vivid ethnographic detail typical of Chekhov’s eye on this trip. Chekhov calls him "китаец" (a Chinese man), the ordinary Russian noun for nationality with no built-in slur register (parallel to "американец"/American); rendered here as "a Chinese man," never "Chinaman," per this corpus’s style policy for the term. Nothing in the passage itself is contemptuous in tone – Chekhov’s attitude toward Son-Lyuli reads as curious and companionable, if condescending in the unremarked way of a nineteenth-century travel diarist noting a foreign custom – so no separate slur-level flag applies here; this is the neutral-ethnonym case, not the reclaimed/pejorative-term case the style guide also covers.

The letter closes with the conventional epistolary furniture this corpus segments as separate sections: the signature ("Your Antoine" – Chekhov’s family nickname, used with his sisters and closest circle), a greeting to the Lintvaryov family (their hosts and close friends at the Sumy dacha), and the address as written on the reverse of the letter/envelope (Sumy, Kharkov province; Maria Pavlovna Chekhova).

This item is textually and chronologically adjacent to but is a distinct, self-contained letter, not a continuation or duplicate of it.