Authors: Michael Meyer
“That’s the most disgusting story I’ve ever heard,” Frances said as our train carriage rocked with snores. We had been together long enough to know each other’s tales by rote, but the worst travel experiences were recalled in the sleepless downtime between stations. Frances shook her head, made a face, and laughed. “Tell it again.”
Back in Harbin, beneath the green onion domes of a former Russian Orthodox cathedral turned city museum, we paced past photographs of Caucasians riding in carriages through the city’s groomed gardens, trailed by their Chinese servants on foot carrying picnic supplies. Other photos showed the muddy banks of the Songhua River in
1898
, when the Chinese Eastern Railway began construction. The caption did not note that, in
1998
, Chinese authorities canceled a planned international academic conference in Harbin on the project’s centennial lest it endorse the notion that Russians had founded the city. A disgusted local Chinese historian said, “An independent nation that has confidence in itself must not be afraid to acknowledge the positive contributions of foreigners in its history. All foreigners were not necessarily aggressors and criminals.”
The museum explained that Harbin was settled first by Chinese. In fact, they were native Northeasterners;
Harbin
came from the Manchu name, which meant “a place to dry the nets.” Russian surveyors arrived to find only a small abandoned distillery, evidence of previous encampments.
There was, as academics loved to say, a lot to unpack here—origins that could be traced “deep into the immeasurable past” rather than a specific event, illustrating nationalism’s “futile attempt to draw impermeable and permanent boundaries onto landscapes that defy the effort.” Harbin’s museum displayed what it evocatively called the “vicissitudes of history” through photos arranged to show the city Before, During, and After Colonialism. But the story was not so simply told: Harbin’s transitions between those periods could also stand for Manchuria’s in the first three decades of the twentieth century, an era bookended by the Russian-built railroad and the Japanese invasion. In between, the Qing dynasty collapsed.
Starting in
1898
, Russians in Harbin created what amounted to a concession—technically illegal, as their railway lease allowed for the construction and administration of a “zone” of control rather than an entire city with extraterritorial rights. They argued, however, that the railroad required more than tracks, and built offices, hotels, shops, and restaurants along broad lamp-lit boulevards extending from the station, where Moscow merchants alighted. Other settlers included Russian Jews fleeing first the czar’s pogroms, then White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks. Harbin’s Jewish community grew to
30
,
000
people, with two synagogues, a library, and its own banks and twenty periodicals, including one named the
Siberia-Palestine Weekly
. Among those buried in its cemetery is the grandfather of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, whose parents had fled here from Russia and Ukraine.
In
2004
, the Harbin government restored one of the synagogues, featuring a large domed roof and pinnacled colonnade, into a Jewish history research center—this, despite the fact that the last remaining member of the city’s Jewish community emigrated in
1985
. In
2013
the city announced it would renovate the other, older synagogue, which had been repurposed as a railway hostel.
Until recently, the Saint Sophia Russian Orthodox cathedral had long been bricked up and used as a furniture storeroom. A journalist visiting in the
1970
s found the ten-story onion-domed church with “windows broken, the grilles rusted and the main door sealed with a wooden slat with nails at either end.” Its redbrick walls were slathered in yellow slogans denouncing imperialism. But in the
1990
s, when economic reforms closed unprofitable state-owned enterprises, Manchurian cities looked for new revenue streams, including tourism, such as Harbin’s ice carnival. Saint Sophia was suddenly a priceless piece of Harbin’s heritage. Public fund-raising, including telethons, raised $
1
.
2
million for the building’s renovation and conversion into a museum/patriotic education base.
Like the synagogues, Saint Sophia was a pretty relic, not a house of worship. It made for a nice photo backdrop and place to sit—no small treat in China, where benches in public spaces were usually forbidden to discourage gatherings (and naps). Today’s tranquillity belied the city’s past as a tinderbox, peopled with seething factions eager to throw a punch or pull the trigger. Saint Sophia’s exhibit of the colonial era concluded with a plaque that read,
The old age is gone with the wind, but the past events are unforgettable.
Yet here, most of them were.
The railroad brought Han Chinese entrepreneurs and settlers as well as foreigners, making Harbin “the world’s crossroads,” a modern version of trade centers such as Xi’an on the ancient Silk Road. For its location on a Songhua River bend, the city was nicknamed “the Pearl on the Swan’s Neck,” though its early twentieth-century reputation was that of an “Infectious Pit.”
In
1903
the British Sinophile Bertram Lenox Simpson (writing as Putnam Weale) found that Harbin showed a different face after the lighting of the lamps. On the way to the theater, he passed on the street two naked men with their skulls beaten in, and “drunken wretches lurking along full of vodka, cursing deeply as they fell over ruts and stones.” For a Russian, he observed, “life in Harbin was so little worth living anyway that debauch was preferable to dullness.” The parties in gambling saloons went until morning, while “suicides punctuate time and relieve monotony”:
“We have had two suicides this week,” whispered a man, “who is to be the third?”
“Not yourself, I hope.”
“No,” he said grimly, “I have got beyond that.”
Simpson’s visit left him “thoughtful and a little sad. Harbin is the very center of Manchuria . . . a place which will be reached for at all costs by the enemy. Who is to conquer in the climax of national anger, hatred and greed, which must come some day and tear this fair country?” He hoped the battle would be won by numbers alone:
30
,
000
Russians lived in Harbin alongside
250
,
000
Chinese. “Russian Manchuria is something of a myth made possible by a gigantic bluff,” he wrote. “It is a remnant of
1900
and China under foreign occupation. Even if there is no force used, Chinese ingenuity alone may push Russia back to the Amur [River].”
Instead it was the Japanese who did the pushing, at least from Port Arthur, at the southern tip of Manchuria, to Harbin in the far north. After the armies of eight Western nations occupied Beijing in
1901
to break a siege of foreign embassies by rebels known as the Boxers, Russia kept an enormous force—
177
,
000
soldiers—in Manchuria long after the other armies had withdrawn. In
1903
, Bertram Lenox Simpson arrived in Jilin city to see the Russian tricolor flying and Russian troops patrolling the streets and running the telegraph office. Simpson predicted that Russia’s position in Manchuria would overextend the czar’s army and drain his treasury.
Japan took a less sanguine view: it suspected Russia had begun a permanent occupation, and opened negotiations with the czar to ensure that Korea became a Japanese protectorate. In February
1904
, after talks failed, Japanese ships launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. His navy crippled, Nicholas II ordered the deployment of the Baltic Fleet, an eight-month voyage away.
Hearst newspapers, fresh off the success of its “Remember the Maine!” coverage of the Spanish-American War, now warned of the “Yellow Peril.” Jack London, whose novel
The Call of the Wild
was a best seller at the time, was dispatched as Hearst’s war correspondent. London pursued the battles on horseback but soon realized his access would be too restricted by Japanese and Russian handlers to do any real reporting. Echoing the Western world’s prediction, London wrote, “Granting that no revolution arises in Russia, and there is no interference of outside powers, I cannot see how Japan can possibly win.”
The Russo-Japanese War was mostly fought in Korea and Northeastern China, though neither were combatants. The war’s use of fixed machine guns, trenches, and massive casualties prefigured the carnage to come in World War One. In the battle for the Manchurian city of Mukden (present-day Shenyang),
330
,
000
Russians faced off against
280
,
000
Japanese. Three weeks later:
90
,
000
Russian casualties,
75
,
000
Japanese, victory for Japan. The decisive blow came in May when the czar’s Baltic Fleet finally arrived to the fight. The Japanese navy sank it within hours.
Jack London’s caveat came true: Nicholas II did face a revolution, one started by the shooting of striking factory workers outside St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace on January
22
,
1905
, a day known as Bloody Sunday. Naval commanders and sailors mutinied; the Reuters correspondent riding a train in Manchuria with survivors of the massive Mukden battle said, “[The] ranks have been filled by reservists, mostly married men, who resent being taken away from home and family. Others have adopted the ideas of the revolutionary parties in Russia.” The war “has been unpopular from the first,” and before the battle a spiritless officer said of the Japanese, “They are going to give us yet another lesson of how things ought to be done successfully.”
In August
1905
, China requested that President Theodore Roosevelt intervene to prevent the Russo-Japanese War from spreading south of the Great Wall. Negotiations between Russian and Japanese diplomats were held on a ship docked at the Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The resulting treaty obligated Russia to recognize Korea as within Japan’s sphere of influence, return Manchuria to Chinese administration, and cede a portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Japan would take control of most of the spur running south from Harbin to Port Arthur, whose leasehold it also acquired. Unlike the Russian trains, which burned wood, Japanese engines were fueled by coal, requiring the opening of mines and other railroad-affiliated businesses along what Japan now called the South Manchuria Railway. In
1910
, foreshadowing its intentions in Northeastern China, Japan annexed all of Korea.
Although he was not present during negotiations, President Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Treaty of Portsmouth. His private correspondence showed that he had followed Manchurian affairs since at least
1901
, when he mocked Mark Twain and “all our prize idiots” who defended the anti-foreigner Boxer rebels as patriots. In that letter to a friend, Roosevelt wrote approvingly of Russia muscling into the Northeast: “As you know, I feel that it is an advantage to civilization to have a civilized power gain ground at the expense of barbarism. Exactly as Turkestan has benefited by Russia’s advance, so I think China would be.”
By
1903
, however, Roosevelt fumed to Secretary of State John Hay over the “mendacity of the Russians” for monopolizing Manchurian trade. “The bad feature of the situation from our standpoint is that as yet it seems that we cannot fight to keep Manchuria open. I hate being in the position of seeming to bluster without backing it up.”
In a
1904
letter prefaced, “Personal—Be very careful that no one gets a chance to see this,” Roosevelt explained to a British diplomat why the United States should settle the Manchurian dispute. “I hoped to see China kept together, and would gladly welcome any part played by Japan which would tend to bring China forward along the road which Japan trod, because I thought it for the interest of all the world that each part of the world should be prosperous and well policed.”
Roosevelt wanted to maintain the “Open Door” policy of free trade in China and to balance Japan’s territorial ambitions with America’s. Although the United States never took a concession in China, in
1898
it became a Pacific power, annexing Hawaii and adding Guam and the Philippines after winning the Spanish-American War.
“The Japs interest me and I like them,” Roosevelt continued. “I am perfectly well aware that if they win out it may possibly mean a struggle between them and us in the future; but I hope not and believe not. At any rate, Russia’s course during the past three years has made it evident that if she wins she will organize northern China against us and rule us absolutely out of all the ground she can control. Therefore, on the score of mere national self-interest, we would not be justified in balancing the certainty of immediate damage against the possibility of future damage.”