In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  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.
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br />   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.

  The street is a pedestrian-only thoroughfare and Harbin’s chief tourist site. It begins at a Holiday Inn and ends at a Walmart bordering Stalin Park on the banks of the Songhua River, where old men flying kites fill its promenade. One man shuffling along in cloth shoes smiled and showed me the pet goldfish he carried in a transparent plastic bag. “I’m taking him out for a walk,” he announced.

  Nearby, a tinny bullhorn set on repeat bleated, “Boycott Japanese products!” University students sitting at a table set in front of the Russian-built Modern Hotel passed out flyers urging us to stand up for the Diaoyu Islands, claimed by both China and Japan since the First Sino-Japanese War. The students competed for attention with a campaign whose table faced them directly across the cobblestones. Its bullhorn blared a trebly recording that ordered us to “resolutely smash illegal electronic games!” Behind the tables, I spied a fairy-tale storefront obscured by vines in bloom. Its evergreen wood façade framed a plate glass window with lace curtains. I ducked inside, silencing the bullhorns by closing the heavy wooden door. The room smelled of cabbage piroshki and espresso. Black-and-white photos of ruddy Russians adorned the yellow walls. The café’s name, Sufeiya, meant Sophia in Chinese.

  Its owner, Hu Hong, was in his fifties, with short black hair flecked with sawdust. “I was just renovating my new restaurant,” he said, raising a shot of vodka in a toast. “I trained as an architect but I’d rather spend my time on the job site, making things. Sitting in a meeting room seeking approval of a design from an official who is not even from your town, but was assigned from far away, is just absurd. It’s one correction after another, one suggestion that you have to implement, no matter how ridiculous. Just today, I was chiseling a rose into a slab of oak—hard work. The building inspector came, looked around approvingly, then on his way out stopped at my table and said, ‘You should carve a different flower. A chrysanthemum would be better.’” Mr. Hu laughed. “Northeasterners can’t help themselves. We’re never happy with the present state of things.”

  Hu grew up in Harbin, the “mixed-blood” child of a Chinese father and a Russian mother. “All of these pictures on the wall are my ancestors,” he said. “This was their house.” A Tchaikovsky suite tinkled faintly on the stereo as Hu walked me around the room, past his family’s old grandfather clock to snapshots of a beautiful woman with bobbed hair and a broad smile that matched the one of the man proudly pointing at her image. “This is my mom,” he said. “I built this café in her memory, and named it for her. She died during the Cultural Revolution. The Soviet Union and China had split then. I was sent away.” He paused. “Another vodka.”

  He handed me a newsletter that showed a steam locomotive next to the title Russia’s News. “I put this together every month. It’s sort of an émigré newsletter. I include translated excerpts from my mother’s 1920s diary.” Mr. Hu said the project was more than just a way to spend time with her memory. It kept Harbin’s memory alive, too.

  “Everyone in this city—the people who grew up here, the natives—are mixed, if not by blood, then by culture,” he said. “It might not be apparent to young people or tourists. Stalin Park? That’s the last one in China, maybe even in Russia. Why is it still named that? People have no idea who Stalin was or what he did. We may as well have named it Hitler Park. But all people know is that Stalin is Russian and now Russia is our friend. But Russia was not always China’s friend, and history isn’t as simple as ‘First it was like that, but now it is like this.’”

  Hu was an architect and showed me a magazine article about his design to commemorate Harbin’s Saint Nicholas Cathedral, which had been razed during the Cultural Revolution. A traffic roundabout stood on its former site. “We could put some onion domes there as statues, at least, to remind people of what was the city’s most prominent building. I doubt that city leaders will agree.” They would argue, he said, that Saint Sophia had been restored and opened as a museum. Preserving one relic was the same as restoring many.

  Hu studied architecture in Japan, making him, as he put it, “an historical Northeasterner”—Chinese with Russian and Japanese components. I brought up the notion of Chinese one day hyphenating their ethnicities. Hu didn’t think a hyphen was necessary. “I’m just Chinese. Most Chinese know that our country is a mix of many cultures and peoples.”

  The hyphens were silent. Transparent, he said. But in Manchuria, you could see them clearly.

  CHAPTER 9

  Tunnels in Time, Sidings to Space

  Before returning to Wasteland and San Jiu’s ripening rice, I followed old railroad sidings to four relics, of a sort, from Manchuria’s cosmopolitan era. The first stop was to a ghost town. The second, a ghost village. The third, a ghostly museum. The fourth stop was to meet a man who swore he had sex with an alien.

  To the ghost town: two hundred miles west of Harbin, I exited the train at Qiqihar. Saying its melodic name was the best thing about the place. Chee-chee ha-ER. The train station was a chocolate-colored monolith built by the Japanese during their occupation. Now it was China’s last to wear a crown of red characters greeting arrivals with LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT.

  During the Qing dynasty, Qiqihar was a military garrison and home to a Muslim community whose three-hundred-year-old mosque looked marooned between new wide boulevards in the city center. The Manchu court would not allow the Russians to run their train line near existing cities, so the Chinese Eastern Railway station was built twenty miles southwest of town, linked by a narrow-gauge shuttle train. The shuttle was gone, replaced by an hourlong bus ride over rutted cement-and-dirt roads to a town named Ang’angxi.

  Its station still remained, looking like a Black Sea dacha: tall windows, gabled roof, and a bright exterior painted salmon pink. There were no bustling passengers, no tooting trains. Aside from the cicadas’ thrumming drone, all was still. Across the street, dirt lanes led past brick cottages with carved wood porticos. The fifty-odd homes—painted yellow and robin’s-egg blue—buckled under rotted rooftops. Weeds reached into broken windows. Volunteer corn filled the former sidewalks. On the main road, which formerly echoed with the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and squeaking carriage wheels, four elderly Chinese women squatted next to standing puddles. The blankets before them displayed limp cucumbers and broad beans. Like the vegetables on sale, the women looked wilted. “If you’re looking for history,” one said, “you’ve come too late.”

  Actually, I had arrived just in time. The pink crenellated fortress that was once the Russian Railway Club showed open doors. Inside, playing cards were scattered on tables, with chairs pushed away, suggesting that everyone had folded and run to catch the train back to the fatherland. Standing in this stillness sent a shiver up my spine. I asked aloud if anyone was there, but the question bounced off the thick walls and returned to me in reply.

  Now only three passenger trains stopped at the station each day; most of the traffic was passing oil tankers and timber-filled boxcars. The ticket window’s lone worker pointed me toward the Chinese plaque hanging on the station’s front that said it had been built in 1903 and had “the railroad’s best surviving wood platform bridge,” roofed against the Manchurian snows. Even today, the barren view was one that would give a traveler pause before getting off a warm train. No wonder the stations on this line were painted in such bright colors.

  In 1930 a Harvard graduate named Liang Siyong disembarked here alone. Railway workers had uncovered a tomb containing
carved stones that, in their words, “looked old.” At the site, Liang performed one of China’s first scientific excavations, discovering that the artifacts dated back seven thousand years. Liang was twenty-six.

  A small museum devoted to the site sat five miles outside town, beside a road that cut razor-straight through wetlands. In the first exhibit room, a tour guide spoke in practiced enthusiasm before a life-size diorama of Asiatic hunter-gatherers. “This settlement was the cradle of northern fishing and hunting civilization,” the guide intoned. “The hominids who lived here created a brilliant culture with their great wisdom and hardworking hands. They made significant contributions to Chinese civilization.”

  They did not have any concept of what China was; they were sparking fire with stones. But the guide continued, “The Ang’angxi hominid created the harmonious state between human and nature with firm, indomitable, and pioneering spirit. They remind us how we can contribute to the strengthening of our nation.” The archaeology site was a patriotic education base. Even hominids could serve the national narrative.

  The museum’s other exhibit room was shuttered. A docent unlocked the doors, flicked on the lights, then left. Displayed behind glass I saw a hand-knit cardigan, a safety razor, and an inkstone. Initially, I thought that the hominids actually did have great wisdom and hardworking hands. But a black-and-white photograph of a young man with oiled black hair, spectacles, and a starched collar and tie revealed that this was a memorial hall for Liang Siyong, the “father of Chinese archaeology.”

  From my years researching Beijing’s planning, I knew about his brother, Liang Sicheng, considered the father of Chinese architecture. I had interviewed his son and read much about his father, a famous court official who had urged the Manchu empress dowager—unsuccessfully—to modernize. But not once had I heard mention of the brother, Liang Siyong.