Authors: Michael Meyer
The explorer Henry E. M. James, fitted in sheepskins
James, p. 15.
Often, however, the party would at last arrive at a settlement
Younghusband., p. 11.
Younghusband, after complaining of natives’ stares
Ibid., p. 8.
(“To my mind, it is one of God’s good gifts”)
James, p. 168.
He also, like travelers to the Northeast today
Younghusband, p. 18. Also like travelers to the Northeast today, he fell victim to a banquet’s beverage selection: “We had been leading a hard, healthy life lately, so had good appetites,” he recorded. “But the drinking was terrible. If we had been allowed to keep at one liquor we might possibly have survived; but the mixture of port and beer, and sherry and claret, and Guinness’s stout and vodka, backward and forwards, first one and then the other, was fatal” (p. 34).
The Northeast holds, after the Yangtze
Reardon-Anderson, p. 113.
An American captain, sent by President Pierce
Collins, p. 232. Of the railroad, Collins wrote: “Even if we find it cannot be accomplished through our efforts, we shall have the remembrance (satisfactory to ourselves) of having known the wants of the country only a little in advance of the times” (p. 390).
“The sturgeon has made sport of us”
Verbiest, p. 77. Even after the construction of the dam upstream from Jilin city, the Songhua river’s tributaries remained prone to flooding. During my first summer in Wasteland, a flash flood smashed cars, swept away roads, and toppled a warehouse, washing three thousand blue barrels of toxic, flammable chemicals into the river. The municipal taps were shut, leading to a panicked run on bottled water, and—this being a part of China—throngs of onlookers at the riverbanks, observing the collection of the barrels, none of which leaked.
“
These were the bodies of colonists who had died”
Younghusband, p. 50.
By
1938
the Northeast had nearly four hundred Catholic churches
In 1838, Rome created a Vicariate Apostolic of Manchuria, after a century of intermittent visits by priests, who sent reports to Europe—such as Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s published in 1741, promulgating the frontier allure of the Country of the Mantcheoux: “The Lands of this Province are in general very good, and abound in Wheat, Millet, Roots and Cotton; they also supply large Herds of Oxen, and great Flocks of Sheep, which are rarely seen in any of the Provinces of China: They have little Rice, but then in recompense they have several of our European fruits, as Apples, Pears, Nuts, Chestnuts, and Filberts, which grow in abundance in all the Forests.”
The rationale of sending medical workers, a priest explained
Christie, p. 26. He felt, too, that because his Manchurian patients were migrants, they were more open to new ideas and practices than “their kinsmen whom they left behind in the old run in the China behind the Great Wall” (p. 14).
“I could weep, but not with sorrow”
O’Neill, p. 37.
In spring she recorded that “mud and blue”
Ibid., p. 52.
“Every day,” she wrote, “I feel more and more”
Ibid., p. 47.
Chapter 8: To the Manchuria Station!
The Manchu came to power on horseback
A short line in Shanghai, built without permission by the Jardine & Matheson trading company, was ordered dismantled after a decade. The Peking–Hankow line was built from 1898 to 1906 but opened in 1915.
There are few parts of the world where
Christie, p. 64. He arrived in Manchuria as a medical missionary of the United Presbyterian (now United Free) Church of Scotland. In his book, published in 1913, he reflected on the missionaries: “Thirty years have gone by, and what is their record? Hostility and persecutions, our houses and all our worldly goods burned, wars and deadly plague, tragic death among our ranks, partings with children sent away to the homeland—they have not been smooth years, but
it has been worth while
.” The italics are his.
Also during this era, the First and Second Opium Wars
The Second Opium War was a punitive battle against a Qing court that reneged on the treaty that ended the first one. In 1858, with France and Great Britain—in addition to the United States and Russia—Manchu ministers had signed the Treaty of Tianjin, opening Chinese ports to foreign trade and allowed for the establishment of diplomatic legations in Beijing.
“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence”
Charles Gordon’s 1860 letter quoted in Elder, p. 246.
The new agreement moved the border back to the Heilongjiang
In 1858 and 1860, Russia and China signed the treaties of Aigun and Beijing, opening the Songhua River (and Jilin city) to Russian ships while also moving the Chinese border south.
The Russians had controlled the river, or thought they did, until the mid-seventeenth century, when the Manchu began pushing back against incursions into what it regarded as Chinese territory. Battles and sieges resulted ended in 1689, when the two sides met to sign China’s first pact with a European power. Written in Latin by Jesuit advisers to the Qing court, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, named for the village in which it was signed, set the border at the Argun River, handing the Amur basin to the Chinese.
Russia, feeling the river was indefensible, and having twice been routed there by the Qing forces, agreed. The border remained fixed there for two hundred years, until the governor of East Siberia, Nikolai Muravyov, began a Manifest Destiny campaign, arguing that Russia’s future was at the Pacific, just as America’s was forming in California. Muravyov sailed a fleet down the Amur, securing the basin through the establishment of forts and the new treaties. Recently, Muravyov’s legacy has been revived in Russia; his grave was moved from Paris to Vladivostok, while his memorial statue, once replaced by Lenin’s, has returned. Its image adorns the five-thousand-ruble note. (See “Amur’s Siren Song, The: The Long River That Marks the Border Between Russia and China Has Proved to Be a Site of Dashed Hopes.”
Economist
, December 19, 2009.)
Yet Chinese are moving back across the border. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, vast areas of state-run farms were abandoned, and now those lands—potentially millions of hectares—are being leased to Chinese homesteaders and entrepreneurs, including county governments. Dongning, a county bordering the Chinese city of Suifenhe, was leasing two hundred thousand hectares (eight hundred square miles, half the size of Rhode Island) of idle cropland on the Russian side of the border, planting potatoes, onions, radishes and cucumbers for sale locally. (See Cui.)
A Chinese diplomat attending
Wolff, p. 5. Li Hongzhang, the Qing diplomat, was a reformer who had supported a previous proposal to built a railway through the Great Wall’s First Pass Under Heaven. It hauled coal, not passengers, but was a profitable sideline business for Li.
The three-million-ruble bribe
Ibid., p. 5. Li accepted the money from Sergei Witte, the Russian finance minister in charge of the Russo-Chinese Bank. The business fronted the Chinese Eastern Railway, as the shortcut through Manchuria was named.
The First Sino-Japanese War was short-lived
In Chinese it is named the War of Jiawu, for its imperial calendar year.
In September
1894
, Japanese warships sank the North Pacific fleet
For the Japanese, the land battles were literally target practice: photos show Qing soldiers in uniforms featuring large solid white circles on the front and back.
Seven months later, the Qing court signed a treaty
It was named the Treaty of Shimonoseki. John W. Foster, former American secretary of state under President Harrison, drafted the terms as an adviser to China. The diplomat Li Hongzhang survived an assassination attempt by a right-wing Japanese at the signing, in the southern Japanese city for which the treaty was named.
“Of course you already know, dear Mama”
Nicholas II, p. 130.
“In order to facilitate the access of Russian land forces”
Wolff, p. 7. The defense pact did not stop an almost all-but-forgotten massacre of Chinese by Russians in far northern Manchuria in 1900. Frances and I took the train overnight from Harbin to Heihe, a Heilongjiang/Amur River port opposite the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk. At the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Qing ships attempted to blockade the river here and attacked Blagoveshchensk. The Russian military governor ordered the expulsion of all Qing subjects—Manchu, Han settlers—from the region who, after the border had been moved, had been allowed to stay. For four days beginning on July 17, Russian soldiers herded thousands of Chinese—women and children included—into the deep, fast-running river. Most could not swim. Once they entered the water, soldiers opened fire.
“The execution of my orders made me almost sick,” a Russian officer said, “for it seemed as though I could have walked across the river on the bodies of the floating dead.” Estimates ranged from
3
,
000
to
8
,
000
dead, with only
40
to
160
survivors; similar attacks occurred along the river. The general who ordered the attacks promised that “the name of the Amur Cossack will thunder through all of Manchuria and strike terror among the Chinese.” A Russian writer who sailed down the Amur three weeks after the killings was sickened by the sight of swollen corpses parting before the ship’s bow.
His account was published three years later in St. Petersburg, a rare mention of the event in the censorious czarist capital, which instead ran accounts with headlines such as “Last Days in Manchuria” detailing the evacuation of Russian railway workers before the advancing Boxer rebels and Qing troops (who killed one passenger, by gunfire). The single journalistic account of the massacre appeared a decade later, under the byline Anonymous. Thousands of civilian causalities did not mesh with the heroic narrative of opening the Siberian frontier. No military tribunals were held, and the killings were investigated in secrecy. The general was indicted and temporarily relieved of duty, but not jailed. Other commanders were sentenced to few months in prison, while the Cossacks involved were absolved of responsibility. Czar Nicholas II issued medals engraved “For the Military Campaign in China,
1900
–
1901
.”
Frances and I found no monument to the massacre on the Chinese riverbank, either. Historical Sino-Russian relations were displayed twenty miles south in the small town of Aihui (Aigun), whose newly built museum held uniformed mannequins with epaulets and bristling mustaches facing ones wearing silk gowns and braided queues. A series of four garish oil paintings depicted the burning of the Qing villages, the settlers’ forced march to the riverbank, and their bodies in the water. Typically for this type of museum—a patriotic education base named “Heroic National Defenders’ Garden”—history was presented in statistics, not personal stories. The paintings’ captions only informed visitors that between July
17
and
21
,
1900
, Cossacks killed more than five thousand Chinese, and that the Qing had signed over Chinese territory. Unnoted was that the Qing rulers were the ones who had first acquired it.
Perhaps the massacre’s memorial was placed in a little-visited town because Heihe and Blagoveshchensk now depended on trade. This was why, our cabdriver back to the train station said, the city’s trash cans, once painted to look like
matryoshka
nesting dolls, were scrapped when Russians, all the way up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had taken offense. On this winter day, at the spot where the massacre had actually taken place, the only sign we found on the riverbank advised, in English:
SLIP AND FALL DOWN CAREFULLY
.
In
1901
, one of its first passengers wrote
Shoemaker, p. 67.
“What is the name of this place?”
Fraser, p. 225.
Mr. Lang, like every Manchu I had met, could not speak or write Manchu
A common misconception held that Manchu was one of the five languages on China’s paper currency, but it was Mongolian. The others were Tibetan, Uighur, Zhuang, and Chinese.
On the train heading here then, a British passenger
Shoemaker, p. 67.
“Has ever the world seen such a spectacle
?”
Simpson (writing as Putnam Weale), p. 397.
“The idea that the railway is going to build up a new Manchuria
”
Ibid., p. 383.
Exiting in
1903
, the Englishman found the station square crowded
Ibid., p.139.
“In Manchuria the lady with a past”I
bid., p. 93.
How happy this would have made the game’s inventor
Naismith, p. 109. I encountered it via Ian Frazier’s citation in
On the Rez
.
The train crossed the Songhua
This bridge was replaced in early 2014 after 113 years of use. Rather than being torn down, it was listed as a cultural relic and converted into a tourist site.