We will try to present the trade environment as some cultural layer (in the 19th- the beginning of the 29th centuries), determine its professional code, conditions of interaction, perception of “Other’ on the background of commercial landscape. As an object of our research we have selected merchants who, on the strength of their business show high level of mobility and adaptation. The commercial sphere is characterized with social activity which demands flexibility and reaction rapidity. These create different situations when the trade people react on perception, create and model interaction model by themselves. Goal: Тo examine cultural patterns in ethnic variety of trade community (on the example of Russian, Chinese, Tatar, central Asian merchants). Trade ways are unique because they have two return points and growing points. They allow us to change the angle of relations seeing: from the imperial center to the periphery and back. In this relation we beg to problematize the aspect of the imperial center - What is the Center of Empire? If to study it from the point of view of political history, the center is in the capital of the Russian empire. Social history allows us to see the imperial center on the territory of periphery, paraphrasing a wellknown conceptual expression of Dipesh Chakrabarty, to make “provincializing Russia”. (Chakrabarty D., 2000) Commercial contacts here are manifestation of social activity of people but not ethnos or religions. Representatives of different countries do business in the context of establishing and strengthening trade networks, they are under creative strategies where there is no place for violence, invasion. Gaining confidence, supporting own economic significance in strengthening personal trade contacts are at the same time conductors of imperial traditions and rituals, languages, and categories having imperial sense of domination and subordination.