 A small population of wealthy elite owned the farmlands in the country, and poor peasants found it difficult to survive.Koreans leaving the country in this period were obliged to move toward Russia, as the border with China was sealed by the Qing Dynasty.However, the first Koreans in the Russian Empire, 761 families totalling 5,310 people, had actually migrated to Qing territory; the land they had settled on was ceded to Russia by the Convention of Peking in 1860.