In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  If the midges didn’t get you, the Manchurian tigers might. “If any one is missing, after the signal for the return to the troop,” another traveler recorded, “they conclude him devoured by the beasts, or lost thro’ his own carelessness.”

  Travelers disappeared into the region’s forests, so thick that, during a nine-day crossing, one eighteenth-century party was “obliged to have several trees cut down by the Mantcheou soldiers, to make room for our observations of the sun’s meridian.” Considering the sights on this leg one hundred years later, Younghusband wrote, “We never saw anything but the trunks of trees.”

  Accounts of nineteenth-century Manchurian travel were a litany of spirits being broken. An English consul traveling to Jilin city in 1896 wrote that “the road was very unsafe, brigandage was of common occurrence, inns were few and far between, and to go on till dark would simply be to court danger.” The next morning he reloaded his revolvers when a bullet came “whistling into the room in which we were seated and scattered the mud from the opposite wall.”

  As the Manchu’s empire waned, bandits evolved into warlords who ruled the Northeast in everything but name. A Chinese miner who struck it rich, known as Han of the Frontier, established a small forest kingdom of 50,000 settlers that existed until his great-grandson retired in 1925. Bandits, known collectively as “red beards” for the opera masks they wore, scoured the postal roads and plains. One brigand, named Ma the Crazy, pillaged towns across the Northeast, requiring Beijing to dispatch an imperial army of four thousand men to hunt and kill him.

  In the nineteenth century, the late-summer rainy season turned the tracks carved by mule-pulled carts into a quagmire. “Road-building” consisted of blazing new ruts alongside the existing ones. They froze in winter, making for jolting journeys in springless wagons.

  The explorer Henry E. M. James, fitted in sheepskins against snowstorms and minus-40-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures, didn’t mind the extreme climate: “As long as the north wind does not blow, it is an honest, dry, invigorating cold.” Echoing my punishing winter walks up Red Flag Road, he added, “But, when the north wind does blow, the less said about it the better.”

  He was pleased when he covered thirty miles in a day. Often, however, the party would at last arrive at a settlement to find a ramshackle inn, a few scrubby mud huts fumigated with cow dung, and a meal that consisted of “some uneatable pork” and “a curry made of salted eggs six months old.” His partner Younghusband’s prose brightened at the sight, in a garrison store, of a can of Singapore pineapples.

  Yet most journeys include delay and regret. Younghusband, after complaining of natives’ stares, added, “But these are the ordinary experiences of every traveler in China, and I am only repeating what has been described a hundred times.” His sanguinity may have come from his discovery, on the trip, of opium. (“To my mind, it is one of God’s good gifts.”) He also, like travelers to the Northeast today, savored the local specialty, dumplings. He described ones “so beautifully cooked and so light that they almost melted in the mouth like jelly.”

  The Northeast holds, after the Yangtze, the second largest river system in China, but its silt-laden channels then ran wide and shallow: in some places the Songhua was a mile wide and three feet deep. River traffic was masted junks with high bows and sterns, not steam-powered ships. An American captain, sent by President Pierce in 1856 to test the waters for commercial possibilities, said that the sound of pilots crying the river depth to the steersman was “slow work, as they laboriously poled along the sand bar, or cordelled along the shore, and reminded me of the early barge and keel-boat navigation on the Mississippi and Ohio.” Though he felt his idea would be dismissed as an impossibility, the captain presciently recommended a railroad be built instead, linking Europe to Manchuria and then the Pacific.

  The rivers were prone to flooding, too. In the seventeenth century, a French priest accompanying the Manchu emperor to Jilin noted a deluge that tore away their fishing nets and damaged their boats, compelling the group to return to land. “The sturgeon has made sport of us,” said the emperor. The surrounding alluvial plains were marked with camels and horses dead and half-submerged in the mud, and “even the emperor was compelled to go on foot, lest his horse sink.”

  In 1886, Henry E. M. James arrived in Jilin city to find its western section “under water a great deal of the year. The inhabitants boat from one place to another just as they do in Venice.”

  Over their three-thousand-mile journey, James and Younghusband survived pests, tigers, bandits, freezing temperatures, bad roads, and intemperate waterways. For eight months across Manchuria, they met woodsmen, gold miners, soybean farmers, Buddhist monks, and ginseng hunters. All had migrated to the new land, recently opened for settlement in a rush that mirrored the one drawing southern Chinese to California in search of gold. Between 1850 and the century’s end, Jilin province’s population increased tenfold.

  As James and Younghusband advanced north, they would often see, heading in the opposite direction, mule-pulled carts laden with coffins. “These were the bodies of colonists who had died in Manchuria,” Younghusband wrote, “and were being brought back to their homes again.” A caged rooster perched atop each coffin. “The cock was intended, by his crowing, to keep the spirit awake while passing through the Great Wall; otherwise, it was feared, the spirit might go wandering off somewhere and forget the body, and the body might be brought in and the spirit left behind.”

  Were this a film, the scene would fade here, on the eve of Manchuria’s transition from an isolated imperial frontier to an international railway zone. We hear the creak of wooden carts pulled by mules straining over muddy ruts. The northern wind rustles shoulder-high sorghum. Masked bandits hide amidst the stalks. Westerners advance past retreating Chinese. Roosters crow on coffins, urging the dead awake.

  In Jilin city, Frances and I walked down the main road, lined with shops found anywhere in China: Shoe City, KFC, Sock Town, a Korean Spicy Soup restaurant, cell phone retailers, a Malahaha Duck Tongue King take-out window, another KFC, and the clothing stores Valued Squirrel, Gweat, and Rich Boss. But then the view showed something unique: a building that survived the city’s great fire of 1930, which had incinerated its wooden buildings. There, on the banks of the Songhua River, stood a gray brick church. Built by French Catholic missionaries in 1926, its Gothic spires looked incongruous against the stolid office building tiled in white squares at its back. Mass was still said here daily, even if most Jilin residents used the church only as a photo backdrop.

  We walked along the river promenade, past Ping-Pong tables and basketball courts and zero-resistance exercise equipment, upon which grandmothers stepped and spun. “They should add these elderly playgrounds to city maps,” Frances said. “They make good landmarks for giving directions.”

  Instead our map showed ducks drawn onto the water. We looked at the actual spot and saw: ducks.

  “Are they decoys?” I wondered. “This is where the imperial boatworks used to be; that’s why the plaza has a ship statue.”

  “Those ducks are just where they’re supposed to be,” Frances said, checking the map. “It’s really up-to-date.”

  In faint characters, the map marked something across the river called Holy Mother Cave. Neither of us had heard of it. But just behind the blooming elms we spied a gleaming white steeple.

  The cab crossed a bridge and dropped us at the start of a rutted cement road. “I can’t drive down to the river on that,” the driver said. “I’ll never make it back up. You can walk.” We stood in front of a small factory that manufactured aluminum windows and doors. I hesitated, waiting for the unseen guard dog to make the first move, but Frances pointed to a small, rusting blue sign: RETIREMENT HOME. “There won’t be any dogs, otherwise the old folks would complain about the noise,” she guessed.

  We walked downhill past vacant houses. No dogs. The road ended at a tall wrought-iron gate for the Catholic Seminary of Jilin Province. It looked vacant, t
oo. A sign posted by the police warned: NO BARBECUING. NO LITTERING. RESPECT THE ENVIRONMENT OF HOLY MOTHER CAVE.

  The road tapered into a path and, turning a corner, revealed a twelve-foot opening in the hillside garlanded with strings of plastic yellow chrysanthemums. A slab of granite within the recess represented the altar, overlooked by a statue of the Virgin Mary perched in an alcove. Six simple wooden benches faced the shrine. The trickle of springwater plinked from within the cave.

  “That’s a surprise,” Frances said. “There aren’t even Buddhist grottoes in the Northeast. No Buddhas, but a Mary.”

  A plaque in Chinese explained that the shrine dated to 1920, when a French Catholic priest arrived in Jilin to build the gray Gothic church. By 1938 the Northeast had nearly four hundred Catholic churches and twelve hundred French priests. During the same era, Protestant missionaries—Irish and Scottish Presbyterians, mostly—founded hospitals that still operate. (The rationale of sending medical workers, a priest explained then, was that “a doctor has a great advantage that he may have an opportunity of relieving bodily suffering, and thus gain an entrance.” English instruction functions similarly today.) Perhaps because they were trained to take patient notes, the medical missionaries were diligent about recording their impressions of Manchuria.

  The thin, fragile books collected dust in the deep recesses of American library stacks, their previous due dates stamped by hand a century before. I was drawn to them: most missionaries wrote surprisingly little about God but rather about being alone and foreign in Manchuria, and being very happy for it.

  I would like to have shared dumplings with a woman named Isabel Mitchell. Tall and strong, with pale eyes and frizzy brown hair pinned atop her head, the Belfast-born Dr. Mitchell moved to Jilin city in 1905, at age twenty-two. In her journal she recorded: “I could weep, but not with sorrow, for my heart is filled with a deep, deep joy. I have reached the land at last, the haven where I would be.” She arrived in winter and wondered if she would ever see a blade of grass. In spring she recorded that “mud and blue” were the colors of Manchuria: the latter described men’s cotton gowns and the “clear, dazzling sky.” Although she faced much more deprivation than I had, her letters echoed how I once felt as a Peace Corps volunteer, acclimating to stares, anticipating mail from home, and slowly learning Chinese. “Every day,” she wrote, “I feel more and more what a wonderful thing it is that I have been allowed to come out here.”

  Dr. Mitchell also constantly wondered whether her work made a difference. She decided to stop questioning its significance: “Being here is the meaning.”

  After succumbing to diphtheria at age twenty-six, Isabel Mitchell was buried in Jilin’s Russian cemetery. A shopping center now stood on the site. No trace of her grave remained.

  Frances and I were surprised that Holy Mother Cave had survived. According to its plaque, the shrine to Mary was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and Red Guards painted anticlerical slogans in the grotto. In 1986, local Catholics donated funds to restore the site “as a quiet place for reflection and prayer.” The wishes of supplicants were scrawled in characters whose black ink shone off the white-painted walls of the chapel above the cave. On this day the shuttered church was attended only by furry spiders fattening themselves on webs hanging over messages to Mary, such as:

  I hope I earn a lot of money.

  I hope I grow a little taller.

  I hope I study better.

  I hope for a good job.

  I hope my mother buys me a cell phone with an MP5 player.

  “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:

  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.

  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 me—how 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

  To the Manchuria Station!

  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.