In Manchuria (50 page)

In Suifenhe, we exited to see a town
he name, like many in Manchuria, meant nothing in Chinese but rather used characters that approximated the Manchu name for the river dividing China from Russia. A place-name gazetteer said that its eddies resembled the symmetrical grooves of a snail’s needle-shaped shell.
Suifen
sounded close to the Manchu word for “awl,” describing both the snail and the water’s current.

The caption did not note that, in
1998
Carter 1, pp. 190–91. The conference was moved to Khabarovsk, its Russian sister city.

There was, as academics loved to say
The Chinese additions to the Russian colonial center reminded me of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of “invented traditions.” An example was the choice of Gothic-style architecture for British Parliament, allowing the nineteenth-century structure to tap into an historical tradition that “stretched back into the assumed mists of time.” Carter’s excellent book
Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City,
1916
–
1932
explains this, and is from where I drew the first two quoted phrases in this paragraph (pp. 161 and 195).

A journalist visiting in the
1970
s
Burns.

Public fund-raising, including telethons
Carter 2, p. 111.

In
1903
the British Sinophile Bertram Lenox Simpson
Simpson (writing as Putnam Weale), pp. 167–71.

“We have had two suicides this week”
Ibid., pp. 169–70.

Simpson’s visit left him
Ibid., 148.

“Russian Manchuria is something of a myth”
Ibid., p 149.

In
1903
, Bertram Lenox Simpson
Ibid., p. 430.

Echoing the Western world’s prediction
London. In a March 19, 1904, letter home, London (stuck in Seoul) complained of not having access to the front: “Have never been so disgusted with anything I have done. Perfect rot I am turning out. It’s not war correspondence at all, and the Japs are not allowing us to see any war.” On April 1, still in Seoul, he wrote: “I’ll never go to a war between Orientals again. The vexation and delay are too great. Here I am, still penned up in Seoul, my 5 horses and interpreters at Chemulpo, my outfit at Ping-Yang, my post at Anjou—and eating my heart out with inactivity. Such inactivity, such irritating inactivity, that I cannot even write letters” (
www.jacklondons.net/writings/BookJackLondon/Volume1/chapter24.html
). In June he wrote the essay “The Yellow Peril,” predicting the rise of China and Japan.

In the battle for the Manchurian city of Mukden (present-day Shenyang)
Mukden
was how Western maps recorded the former seat of Manchu power. The term came from the Manchu word
mukembi
(arise). The city was renamed Shengjing (Rising Capital) in Chinese and then changed again to Shenyang.

Naval commanders and sailors mutinied
Brooke, pp. 302–10.

In August
1905
, China requested that President Theodore Roosevelt
Prior to hosting the negotiations, the United States showed little interest in Manchurian affairs. Unlike along the Yangtze Delta, no American missionaries worked the Northeast. Financiers such as John D. Rockefeller did not build hospitals there, as in Beijing, nor send surveyors to plan railroads, as teams did in Guangzhou (Canton) under the auspices of his American-China Development Company. A small trade in cotton, railroad equipment, and kerosene (via Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil) had begun with the north, but overall, business with China, including Manchuria, then represented a mere 2 percent of all American foreign trade.

“As you know, I feel that it is an advantage
”
Morrison, p. 112. This letter, written on July 8, 1901, was to George Ferdinand Becker, a prominent American geologist who had served in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.

“The bad feature of the situation”
Ibid., p. 478. This letter was written to Hay on May 22, 1903. Hay had helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris (ending the Spanish-American War) and authored the Open Door Policy, whereby no foreign power would dominate trade or a treaty port in China.

“Personal—Be very careful”
Ibid., pp. 830–32. This letter, written on June 13, 1904, was to the British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, who would act as Roosevelt’s best man at his wedding and serve as ambassador to the United States from 1912 to 1918.

In September
1904
, while on holiday
Ibid., p. 917. This letter, written on September 2, 1904, was to Secretary of State John Hay.

“State of Anarchy Found at Harbin,
the
New York Time
’s
front page declared
New York Times
, April 19, 1908. In Harbin, its correspondent wrote, “a remarkable state of affairs exists. The Russian town is governed and dominated by a private railway company.”

His vice-consul was a beefy, baby-faced college graduate
Fairchild, pp. 86-87.

One writer imagined Chinese voices whispering
Tisdale, p. 139. Her account included “dialogue” with the natives in pidgin English, such as: “Boy! Boy! You no belong proper boy. You have sleepy. Plenty piecie [bandits] kill two gentlemen, night time no have catchee place sleep.” In comparison, Fairchild dedicated himself to learning Chinese.

“I didn’t wonder the Chinese want their country”
Gairchild, p. 111.

Fairchild had arrived in Manchuria in October of
1906
Ibid., pp. 153 and 136. As with the Belfast missionary nurse stationed in Jilin, it’s wrenching to read this diary of a happy person unaware that he was about to die far from home.

That winter, however, the front page of the
New York Times
“Consul Shoots Himself,”
New York Times
, December 20, 1906. Fairchild was buried in Mukden’s Russian cemetery but was disinterred two months later after the Japanese shuttered it in the 1930s and moved south to the concession of Newchang (Yingkou), where no trace of it can be found today.

Coincidentally, another American shooting—this one by the consul general to Harbin—made the front page of the
New York Times
on May 12, 1914, under the headline “Consul Warner a Suicide.”

Manchuria lost an admirer
Fairchild, p. 100.

The following year in Harbin, a Korean nationalist
“Prince Ito Assassinated,”
New York Times
, October 26, 1909. Ito wanted Korea to remain a Japanese protectorate and not be officially annexed.

“I didn’t do this as an individual”
Perlez.

Street battles broke out between Bolsheviks and White Russians
Chiasson, p. 46.

An American traveler reported throngs of exiles
Franck, pp. 93.

“There is no way of computing”
Ibid., p. 101.

The warlord Zhang Zuolin took hold of the Northeast
Zhang was more than just a thug. Under Zhang’s “Colonization for Development Plan,” Manchuria’s population and arable land doubled, as a new policy aimed at migrant laborers enticed them to stay with an offer of a house that they could own after five years of tenancy, relief from taxes during that period, and fields to sow. A Japanese traveler riding the train through Jilin at this time wrote that “with roughly 30,000 Koreans having moved to northern Manchuria alone and working the paddy lands, the yield of rice will surely rise and may come to occupy an important position in the agricultural produce of Manchuria” (Yosano, p. 58). Prior to these migrants’ arrival, the small amount of rice grown in the Northeast was on dry land.

Shops signs written in Cyrillic were ordered changed
Carter 1, p. 146.

Over Leninists’ protests
Chiasson, p. 127 (showing a photo of the shrine from Dr. Olga Bakich).

The city’s official holidays now included
Ibid., p. 114. An uneasy peace existed between the new Soviet caretakers of the Chinese Eastern Railway until 1920, when the Chinese Republican government announced the assumption of all police and court duties, the revocation of Russian extraterritoriality, and true coadministration of the Chinese Eastern Railway with Russia in the north and Japan in the south. Fluttering over Harbin station was a flag featuring a hammer and sickle added to the red stripe of the five-color Chinese Republic banner.

He bought favor by treating the bandits’ syphilis
Howard, p. 156. The doctor’s name was Harvey J. Howard. He had been Puyi’s ophthalmologist in Beijing.

A dramatic performance of an English music hall play
Ibid., pp. 209–11.

The post-match stat sheet counted injuries
Chiasson, pp. 198–99. Brawls after basketball games still occur in China: in 2011, a game between Georgetown University and a Chinese professional team ended in a chair-throwing melee.

In 1924, Chinese farmers attacked a Russian dairy farm, chasing away its tenants, tearing down its modern equipment, and planting their own traditional crops while squatting on the land. Other farmers staged rent strikes.

Russians living in Chinese-controlled Harbin
“Harbin’s ‘Squeeze’ Highly Developed,”
New York Times
, October 23, 1927.

Harbin deserved its nickname as “Paris of the Far East”
“Visitors to Harbin Find Expenses High,”
New York Times
, October 28, 1928.

White Russians—stateless without valid passports
“Harbin’s ‘Squeeze’ Highly Developed,”
New York Times
, October 23, 1927.

A British man beaten by police
Ibid.

Harper’s
magazine wrote that Harbin was
Gilbreath.

A Japanese colonel had planned the assassination
The Japanese military itself did not know of the assassination plot in advance, so were not mobilized to use the event as a pretext for grabbing more control of Manchuria, in the name of security. Now, with the patriot Zhang Xueliang in charge, Japan would wait three years for its next chance.

What had the elder Zhang done to make Japan want to dispose of its erstwhile ally? In 1920, Zhang Zuolin had attempted to overthrow the Chinese Republican government, attacking Beijing before falling back outside the Great Wall and strengthening his hold on Manchuria. In 1926 he succeeded in capturing Beijing, declaring himself grand marshal of the republic. China’s Nationalist (KMT) army, led by Chiang Kai-shek on his Northern Expedition to eradicate regional warlords, pushed Zhang out in 1928, the year the Chinese capital was relocated south, to the Yangtze River city of Nanjing. Zhang’s Beijing foray angered Japan, which preferred their reliable partner to maintain the status quo in Manchuria, guaranteeing their share of the railroad. Even worse, from the Japanese perspective, was that Zhang had been routed by the Nationalists, allies of the Soviet Union. Both forces wanted Japan out of Manchuria.

“Russian Mobs Fight Chinese in Harbin”
New York Times
, January 5, 1932.

The police charged; the mob took up positions
Yosano, p. 96.

The café’s name, Sufeiya
Hu Hong pulled a book from its shelves titled
The Oriental Paris
. The volume of photographs captured Harbin’s most prominent existing colonial structures, from smaller cathedrals to the restored synagogue and the former American consulate. It was the best guidebook for wandering around town, and I wondered what made a person chronicle Harbin’s colonial fossils long before they became tourist bait.

I came and watched them tear it down,” Song Hongyan, a middle-aged photographer, said of her childhood home. “That moved me to start documenting the history that remained.” We stood on a narrow lane running through the Daowai district, or Harbin’s “Chinatown” during its colonial era, where most non-Europeans lived. The brick buildings adjoined one another, creating a contiguous street wall punctured by carriage entrances that led into courtyards. Wooden balustrades traced the rotting staircases up to the second floor and a balcony lined with apartment doorways. Migrant workers now occupied the tenements, which look uninhabitable. “Isn’t it ironic,” Miss Song said, “how often the poorest people live in the formerly richest houses.”

The neighborhood, China’s largest remaining swath of colonial-era housing, was being remade into a development named Chinese Baroque. Its brochure showed a map of China, marking historic districts reconditioned into open-air shopping malls in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Changsha. The photos depicted European-style buildings whose gray-brick façades held signs for Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs. “Every city has its unforgettable memories,” the salesgirl told me, handing us an investment guide. “Chinese Baroque combines that traditional culture while creating a new future.”

He enjoyed walking and talking with Song Hongyan, and was shocked when Hu Hong later called to tell me she had committed suicide by jumping from her apartment window.