Authors: Michael Meyer
I hope for a good job.
I hope my mother buys me a cell phone with an MP5 player.
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“That person is confusing Mary with Santa Claus,” Frances said.
I thought perhaps a place had developed enough when its people prayed not for health or safety but for a cell phone upgrade, or:
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I hope my mother listens to me better. I hope I can listen to her better, too. We need to stop fighting.
I hope my daughter's temper improves.
I hope my father stops gambling.
I hope for a good husband. Around
30
years old.
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I found the words comforting and human, a reliquary of yearning instead of remains. Frances leaned against me as we read a letter written in dense characters that filled an alcove's entire wall. It began:
I miss you, oh how I miss you. Do you know? Do you miss me? Now you won't speak to meâhow did we end up like this? I really didn't want things to end this way. I really didn't. Life is so short.
I held Frances tighter. As the short-lived Dr. Isabel Mitchell had recorded, being here was the meaning.
CHAPTER
8
The Manchu came to power on horseback and had shown little interest in—or understanding of—railroads. The empress dowager had not allowed tracks to enter Beijing, as they would pierce the city’s wall. In
1888
her ministers installed a small train within the Forbidden City that ran between her quarters and dining hall. She would ride in it only if eunuchs pulled the cars. The steam engine’s clatter, she said, would disrupt the palace’s feng shui.
But only twenty-five years later, a Scottish missionary stationed in the Northeast wrote: “There are few parts of the world where the modern change in ease of access has been more marked than in Manchuria. One can now leave London at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and after a comfortable sleeping-car [train] journey drive through [Manchurian] streets in the afternoon of Friday, eleven days later. The contrast with thirty years ago, and indeed with thirteen years ago, is greater than the contrast between that time and the days of sailing ships.”
By the time the Belfast nurse Isabel Mitchell traveled overland to Jilin city in
1920
, she passed through Harbin, a booming railway hub nicknamed “the Paris of the East.” Residents from fifty-three nations—including the Far East’s largest Jewish community—spoke forty-five languages on its cobblestone streets.
The imperial court did not have a sudden reformist vision to link their Manchurian homeland to Europe by train. Instead, it relented to the railroad’s construction by foreigners.
The Manchu had tried to bend the Northeast to their design via restrictions against Chinese migration and the building of the Willow Palisade. By the mid-nineteenth century those plans had failed, while their dynasty also began losing its grip on greater China. Beginning in
1850
, the domestic rebellion led by the Han Chinese who declared himself the younger brother of Jesus lasted fourteen years and killed twenty to thirty million people; the cost of suppressing the revolt drained imperial coffers. Also during this era, the First and Second Opium Wars with Britain and France forced Chinese ports open to foreign trade, led to the establishment of diplomatic legations near the Forbidden City, and resulted in the Manchu’s summer palaces being torched.
“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burnt,” wrote the young British captain Charles Gordon (later killed in Khartoum). “It made one’s heart sore . . . It was wretchedly demoralizing work for an army.” Among the spoils: the first Pekingese dog in Great Britain, presented to Queen Victoria. She named it Looty.
Russia forced the Qing court to tear up the first treaty it had signed with a European power, in
1689
, ending campaigns that extended Chinese territory further into Siberia. The new agreement moved the border back to the Heilongjiang (Black Dragon, or Amur in Russian)—where it remains—resulting in the loss of a Texas-size swath of land and access to the Pacific shore. In
1860
, nearly six thousand miles from Moscow, on a piece of coastline Chinese and Manchu fishermen called Haishenwai (Sea Cumber Cliffs), Russia built the port of Vladivostok. Now it had to get there.
In Chinese, this era is dubbed one of “unequal treaties” and “the mad rush to carve up the melon,” but it also resembled a royal-family game of Monopoly. In
1897
, Czar Nicholas II forcibly leased the southern Manchurian redoubt Port Arthur. In
1898
, his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II grabbed the central coast port of Tsingtao, compelling the court to sign a ninety-nine-year lease. Under similar terms that year, Wilhelm’s grandmother Queen Victoria extended her hold on Hong Kong.
As czarevitch, Nicholas had sunk a ceremonial shovel for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. A Chinese diplomat attending Nicholas’s coronation in
1896
agreed to grant Russia a rail concession across Manchuria, cutting its distance to Vladivostok and the Pacific. The three-million-ruble bribe paid to the diplomat notwithstanding, the railroad’s construction actually became possible far from St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, where a war fought just offstage in Manchuria’s wings resulted in the Qing dynasty turning to Russia for protection.
The kingdom of Korea had been a tributary state of China. An industrializing Japan wanted it as a buffer zone against foreign encroachment in Asia. During an internal rebellion in
1894
, the Korean king requested the assistance of Chinese troops, whose arrival broke an agreement between China and Japan to notify the other side before deploying forces. Japan sent a larger contingent, which seized the royal palace in Seoul and deposed the king in favor of pro-Japanese government.
The First Sino-Japanese War was short-lived and one-sided. One of China’s four naval fleets, the North Pacific, had once been Asia’s mightiest flotilla, but it was crippled by officers’ corruption and embezzlement. Admirals had pawned their deck guns, perhaps because no ammunition had been purchased for the fleet since
1891
. The funds were directed to restore Beijing’s looted summer palaces, including the construction of a double-decked marble paddleboat that was anything but seaworthy. The empress dowager used it as a veranda for drinking tea.
In September
1894
, Japanese warships sank the North Pacific fleet and routed Chinese troops from Pyongyang, pursuing them north into Manchuria. Seven months later, the Qing court signed a treaty that recognized Korea’s independence and granted Japan control of Taiwan. (It soon annexed the nearby Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which China also claimed, causing saber-rattling to this day.) It also ceded to Japan the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria.
Russian-controlled Port Arthur sat at its tip. Unlike Vladivostok, the port remained ice-free year-round. The czar persuaded France and Great Britain to force Japan—under threat of war—to hand the peninsula to Russia in exchange for an increased indemnity. In
1898
, Russia signed a lease with China for the territory.
“Of course you already know, dear Mama,” the young Nicholas II wrote to his mother that year, “the glad news of the occupation of Port Arthur, which in time will be the terminus of the Siberian railway. At last we shall have a real port that does not freeze. Above all I am thankful that this occupation was peaceful, without the loss of any Russian blood! This gives me real joy. Now we can feel safe out there for a long time!”
To the Qing court, Russia sold the idea of a railroad through their Manchurian homeland as part of a secret defense pact against Japan. “In order to facilitate the access of Russian land forces to places under threat,” the contract said, “the Chinese government agrees to the construction of a railroad across the Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin toward Vladivostok.” And also south to Port Arthur, as the czar exulted to his mom.
Echoing the example of the Canada Atlantic Railway, which connected Montreal to Halifax via Maine, Russians engineers drew a track diagonally across northern Manchuria, forming a nine-hundred-mile-long shortcut to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow. Once completed, an influx of Europeans arrived in numbers the Qing dynasty neither expected nor had the power to curb.
The line was named the Chinese Eastern Railway, and its tracks formed a T-shaped steel suture running across Manchuria’s shoulders and down its spine. The empress dowager ordered that the train could not enter existing Manchurian towns or garrisons or pass near graveyards, which would disturb
feng shui
. In
1901
, one of its first passengers wrote that he was “weary of gazing off upon the eternal snows, the vast expanses of nothingness which stretch around the crawling train.” Time and again it pulled into a desolate station, prompting this exchange:
“What is the name of this place?
“It has not got a name yet.”
Heading east from Russia, the first stop in China was Manchzhuriya Station. Its echo is heard in the city’s contemporary name: Manzhouli—“Inside Manchuria.”
The border town sits on Inner Mongolian grasslands eight hundred miles northwest of Wasteland, and I was eager to see if any relics remained from its founding. From there, I would retrace the journey travelers made a century before, crossing northernmost Manchuria on the Chinese Eastern Railway.
Train
1303
was not a high-speed carriage but one of the antiquated four-number long-haulers that formed a slow-rolling town square. Passengers removed their shoes, stretched out, and passed the hours sipping steaming tea, making small talk, eavesdropping on others’ small talk, staring, playing cards, texting, reading, pacing, napping, drinking, and snacking. My package of Drunkard brand fried peanuts came with instructions in English that explained: “You can enjoy it as soon as you open it.”
I had a hard berth, one of six bunks stacked off an open corridor. On the opposite bunk, a young man named Lang Shitao stared searchingly out the window. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see me,” he said, motioning to the acne that colonized his cheeks. Everyone became close, immediately, on a train, and my foreignness often transformed the berth into a confessional. The twenty-one-year-old was headed for a dermatology clinic near his home in Harbin city. I said I was heading to Manzhouli, looking for traces of history. His parents were different ethnicities, he volunteered. His mother was Han Chinese, his father Manchu. Her parents migrated north on the train for work; his parents traced their lineage to bannermen, the imperial military-administrative system. He wondered how to say this in English, then asked me to explain the difference between saying one is “Manchu” versus “a Manchu.”
“I am both,” he decided, “but really, I’m a ‘mixed-blood.’”
He had taken a leave from engineering school, which he attended on a partial scholarship awarded because his identification card listed him as Manchu; ethnic minorities were eligible for such benefits. Previous generations of Manchu hid their identity, passing as Han Chinese, he said. Now, even though the national census counted only
10
million Manchu, it was one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups as people reclaimed their lineage. Mr. Lang, like every Manchu I had met, could not speak or write Manchu; the language was all but extinct, glimpsed mostly on signboards in former palaces.
As the train picked up speed, lines blurred past the window: telephone poles, apple orchards, smokestacks, and walls bearing painted ads for liquor, motorcycles, and the promise
THE PEOPLE
’S RAILWAY SERVES THE PEOPLE
. Lang watched until the sun sank and the window showed his hated reflection. Then he drew the curtains.
I woke somewhere after Harbin. A striking woman wearing purple long johns that matched her painted toenails lounged in Lang’s bunk. For a drowsy moment I thought his skin treatment had been a marked success. The train bore west out of the Songhua River valley, entering wetlands that ran to the horizon. The only movement out the window came at the town of Daqing, where “kowtow machines,” as pumpjacks are called in Chinese, rose and bowed, bowed and rose, extracting petroleum from China’s largest oilfield.
Passengers padded to the cabin’s squat lavatories and open sinks holding toothbrushes. Gurgles and rinse-spits echoed down the corridor. I grabbed a wad of tissues, filled a cup with Nescafé, and walked in the opposite direction to the samovar. The adjoining car was a “soft sleeper,” a higher ticket class, but no one stirred behind the cabin’s closed doors, and I crept to its Western-style toilet, feeling sneaky. The slam of a door at the far coupling revealed a uniformed attendant.
Waddle casual
. He smiled as we turned sideways to allow each other to pass. Subterfuge on a slow train! I was home free.
Sixteen hours remained to Manzhouli. As the train climbed through a low mountain range and entered the grasslands, the houses changed from redbrick structures to squat huts of mortared boulders topped with peaked roofs. The more desolate the geography, the brighter the stations: blue roofs outshone the cloudless sky and plots of sunflowers waved us onward.