Authors: Michael Meyer
In September
1904
, while on holiday in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Roosevelt wrote to Secretary Hay that he was “immensely pleased” with the account of Chinese officials wishing to treat Japanese soldiers entering Port Arthur as conquerors, evincing their disdain for their feeble Manchu emperor. “I am equally delighted,” Roosevelt wrote, by the anecdote of a woman standing quayside when the Japanese landed. For the first time in modern history, an Asian army had defeated a European power. “Really,” the woman remarked, “I do not think the British Consul will have many people for tennis today.”
“State of Anarchy Found at Harbin,” the
New York Times
’s front page declared in
1908
. “Russian Soldiers Do Nothing to Guard It and Few Residents Venture out After Dark; Conduct of the Japanese, Who Are Flooding Manchuria, Angers the Foreign Residents.” The story said that the region’s “American Consuls are supporting the Chinese against the aggressions of Russia and Japan.”
Two men had recently been appointed to the region by Roosevelt, including Willard Straight as consul general at Mukden, then under Japanese control. Straight—who would go on to found the
New Republic
magazine—had a patrician’s look, with thin hair flattened to one side over a high brow and jug ears. His vice-consul was a beefy, baby-faced college graduate named Nelson Fairchild, who rode the train through Harbin. “As nasty a place as you can imagine,” he wrote in a letter home. “At night one walks in the middle of the street with revolver drawn.”
Straight and Fairchild found a vacant Buddhist temple to house the consulate. Both were sympathetic with China’s plight, unusual for the pre–
Good Earth
era; memoirists living in Manchuria at this time often wrote about “the fear of turning Chinese.” One writer imagined Chinese voices whispering, “You can never escape us. You are forgotten by your kind. Each day you are less a white man.”
Straight, however, was a reputed Japanophobe, and argued for increased American involvement in Manchuria. Fairchild, in a letter home, wrote that he found the Northeast beautiful: “I didn’t wonder the Chinese want their country for themselves, and hate having foreigners butting in and putting up railroads and telegraphs.” Fairchild had arrived in Manchuria in October of
1906
and, despite watching the consulate thermometer’s mercury drop “till nothing is left but a small globule rolling round in agony at the very bottom,” took five-mile walks, went pheasant hunting for a Thanksgiving meal, began daily Chinese lessons, and wrote, “I certainly like the place enough to stay five or six years.”
That winter, however, the front page of the
New York Times
reported: “Consul Shoots Himself.” “It is believed that his death was accidental. Much sorrow is expressed here. The funeral will be held tomorrow.” In a privately published memorial book of Fairchild’s letters, the final entry came from Willard Straight, informing Fairchild’s parents that their son’s revolver had accidentally discharged. Manchuria lost an admirer, one who wrote that the land was “too rich too fail” and that when its people “have better methods they will be able to do wonders. China is waking up for sure.”
Fairchild’s superiors in distant Washington, D.C., saw Manchuria more as an important piece of the geopolitical puzzle. In
1908
, in exchange for Japan’s endorsement of American claims to the Philippines and Hawaii—as well as limits on Japanese immigration to the U.S.—the United States formalized its recognition of Japanese interests in Korea and Manchuria. The pact weakened America’s ability to influence Japan’s actions there.
The following year in Harbin, a Korean nationalist assassinated the former Japanese prime minister, who as resident-general had become Korea’s de facto ruler. In October
1909
, Prince Ito Hirobumi rode the train to Manchuria for a conference. Waiting at the Harbin station was a twenty-nine-year-old member of the Korean resistance named Ahn Jung-geun, who fired six shots. Three pierced Ito’s chest, killing him. Unlike the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand five years later, Prince Ito’s murder did not start a war. Russian soldiers handed Ahn over to the Japanese. At his trial, he said, “I didn’t do this as an individual, I did it as a soldier of the Korean Volunteer Army, and I did it for my motherland’s independence and for peace in the East.” He was found guilty and executed. Japan formally annexed Korea in
1910
. (A century later, Ahn’s picture was displayed in a small exhibit at the Harbin train station. It was the rare patriotic education base that taught that Japan’s incursions were regional and not only targeted at China.)
Republican Chinese overthrew the Manchu dynasty in
1911
. The last emperor, Puyi, was allowed to abdicate in the following year, at age six. Rather than move to his ancestral homeland, he retreated to the northern half of the Forbidden City. At age sixteen he cut off his braided queue.
Though nominally a republic, post-imperial China was fragmented; its first president, Sun Yat-sen, famously said that the nation appeared to be “a loose sheet of sand.” Warlords controlled entire regions, among them men who had once fought for the Qing imperial army, such as the Manchurian strongman Zhang Zuolin, whose plot to return Puyi to the throne had failed. This, after a different warlord had restored the boy emperor in
1917
, a reign that lasted a mere eleven days before being toppled by republican troops.
In
1925
, shortly before Puyi turned nineteen, yet another warlord drove him out of the Forbidden City for good. His ancestors had entered Beijing as conquerors on horseback. He departed a civilian, seated on a plush-cushioned train carriage, rolling eighty-five miles east to the port of Tianjin. The city was home to several foreign concessions, whose buildings resembled their faraway cousins: Georgian English homes, Palladian Italian villas, a Gothic French cathedral. In Tianjin the Japanese offered Puyi a garden residence in their concession. He moved in and waited, unaware that six years would pass before he would be called to action, in Manchuria.
The fall of the Qing, followed by the Russian Revolution in
1917
, left Manchuria, and especially Harbin, adrift. The accords that created the Chinese Eastern Railway had been signed by governments that no longer existed. Street battles broke out between Bolsheviks and White Russians for control of the railway’s offices; Chinese soldiers were caught in the crossfire at Harbin’s railway bridge and chose to side with the revolutionaries.
With few other options, White Russians fled east on the train, massing in Harbin. An American traveler reported throngs of exiles, including “princesses in simple but very appropriate garb . . . old generals still wearing their uniforms, blazing from shoulder to shoulder with decorations, and the same haughty expression of men expecting instant obedience as in their bygone days of power and emoluments.” But here, too, were the penniless refugees. “There is no way of computing,” the traveler wrote, “how many Russian girls, with nothing to live on but the sale of their charms, there were along the Chinese Eastern Railway from [Manzhouli] to Vladivostok, like the little end of the funnel down through which the miseries of Russia had been oozing for years.”
The warlord Zhang Zuolin took hold of the Northeast. In photos he looks like an unthreatening schoolmaster, with a thin frame, slumped shoulders, shaved head, and drooping mustache. But his career of brigandage had supposedly began after the young Zhang killed a wounded “red beard” bandit and assumed the outlaw’s identity. Later the Qing court made his band of men an official unit to hunt and kill gangs of thieves in Manchuria. Zhang proved adept at playing both sides. After the Qing dynasty fell, the warlord spun Manchuria’s spoils as if set upon a lazy Susan, rotating between Beijing, Russia, and Japan when it most profited himself.
Under Zhang, in
1920
, Harbin city came under Chinese control for the first time. Shop signs written in Cyrillic were ordered changed to Chinese characters, a Confucian temple was erected, and street signs were repainted. Orthodox Street became Culture Street, while Nicholas Street was renamed Temple Street, for the city’s first Buddhist shrine. (Over Leninists’ protests, the popular icon of Saint Nicholas remained in Harbin station.) The city’s official holidays now included the Chinese New Year, Russian Orthodox Easter, Chinese Revolution Day, and the Anniversary of the Soviet Union.
Despite the appearance of ethnic harmony, Harbin had not become a functioning melting pot. Bandit activity continued, indiscriminate in its targets. Downriver from Harbin, brigands attacked a farm started by an American army major to employ Chinese famine refugees. The outlaws killed the major and a Chinese farmer and kidnapped the American ophthalmologist who had been visiting from his post at Peking Union Hospital. In his book
Ten Weeks with Chinese Bandits
, the doctor recounted his sorrow at the death of his friend, and his enterprise. As his captivity dragged on, however, the chapter titles tilted toward sentiment such as “From the Sublime to the Ridiculous.” He bought favor by treating the bandits’ syphilis, trachoma, and ringworm, wryly noting: “They had no books or newspapers to read; they did not play games; they were not given to writing letters or biographic notes; nor were they accustomed to spend their waking hours in quiet reflection. But they knew how to talk, and in this they indulged constantly. Their chief topic of conversation was opium.” This led to Chapter
24
: “In Which I Teach the Bandits English and Refuse to Assist Them in Smuggling Opium into Peking.” Deep in the night, he was woken by soldiers, unsure—despite their uniforms—if they were his rescuers or another group after the ransom. They were the warlord Zhang Zuolin’s men, and he was saved.
In Harbin, relations between Chinese and Russians splintered. A dramatic performance of an English music hall play at a fund-raiser for the Russo-Chinese Technical Institute saw half the dignitaries in attendance stand up and leave when a Chinese character spoke pidgin English—“Oh dearee me! This is most ostrepulous!”—and a Western character responded: “A Chinaman is never at a loss for a lie.”
In
1926
, Harbin students rioted after a Russian YMCA team beat a Chinese high school team,
29
–
17
. The post-match stat sheet counted injuries on both sides and broken windows across town.
Russians living in Chinese-controlled Harbin complained of “squeeze,” in which they had to pay higher prices. Harbin deserved its nickname as “Paris of the Far East,” a visitor wrote, because its prices were on par with it. White Russians—stateless without valid passports—had to pay for exit permits if they had a line to a new life outside Harbin. A British man beaten by police and held on a bogus charge until he paid an exorbitant fine was released by a city official who told him, “We are very sorry. We were under the impression that you were Russian.”
Harper’s
magazine wrote that Harbin was “the only white city in the world ruled by yellows.” This, in a shocking dispatch headlined: “Where Yellow Rules White.”
On June
4
,
1928
, a bomb ripped through the private train carrying the warlord Zhang Zuolin, mortally wounding him. A Japanese colonel had planned the assassination, wanting Zhang replaced by someone more pliant. The warlord’s son did not publicly blame Japan for his father’s death. Instead, he assumed power in the Northeast and forged a reconciliation with the Chinese republican government, binding Manchuria’s interests to the nation’s. If the Japanese thought Zhang Xueliang—known as the Young Marshal—would be as bribable as his father, he dispelled that notion in
1929
at a dinner attended by his top officials. The Young Marshal ordered that the two officers sympathetic to Japan be executed by gunshot at the table.
“Russian Mobs Fight Chinese in Harbin,” the
New York
Times
reported in
1932
. “Five Are Killed and
22
Hurt in a Battle of Ice-Encrusted Street Barricades.” Following the theft of a small cake by a famished eight-year-old Russian waif, the child was taken to a Chinese police station, where a Russian mob gathered, demanding his release. The police charged; the mob took up positions on Kitaiskaya Street, Harbin’s cobblestone grand boulevard of hotels and shops, where usually Russian girls sold lilacs and irises beside Chinese vendors displaying candied hawthorn berries on bamboo skewers, and shoppers, a traveler wrote, walked with a “lighthearted gait as if they were prepared at any moment to break into dance.” Now the crowd wrenched furniture, doors, and window frames from businesses and built street barricades. In Harbin, the
Times
breathlessly reported, “tension and clamor reign, recalling the wild days of the French Revolution.”
For the first time, czarist and Soviet Russians fought side by side. Chinese police turned fire hoses upon them, but it was January and the water froze, “making the barricades as solid as masonry.” Next the police charged with rifles, causing the Russians to countercharge, swinging clubs and fists. That round went to the Russians.
Today the street is named Zhongyang Dajie—Central Boulevard—and its cobblestones remain, as does its procession of art nouveau shops, painted pistachio green and lemon yellow. Uniquely for China, plaques on the buildings tell—in Chinese and English, but not Russian—who designed the structure and its original use. Most had been department stores and restaurants begun by Russian Jews. They are still in business, if recast as a Northeast Dumpling King, a McDonald’s, the Northeast Fur Store, a shop selling nesting dolls, and a window steamed over from fresh loaves of brown Russian bread.