In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  The renaming proclamation took place in November 1635 and read: “Originally, the name of our people was Manju, Hada, Ula, Yehe, and Hoifa. Ignorant people call these ‘Jurchens.’ [But] the Jurchens are those of the same clan of Coo Mergen Sibe. What relation are they to us? Henceforth, everyone shall call [us] by our people’s original name, Manju. Uttering ‘Jurchen’ will be a crime” (Elliott 1, p. 71).

  Ten days later, the emperor ordered: “The name of the country is called ‘Manchu’” (Ibid., p. 401).

  Many live in clusters such as the Manchu Autonomous County Despite being one of China’s largest ethnic minority groups, the Manchu were the last to be granted an area with a modicum of self-governance, in 1983. By then, fourteen of the largest fifteen groups had their own autonomous regions and prefectures. The delay could have stemmed from spite. Or it evinced that the Manchu had—unlike Tibetans and Muslim Hui people—melted into Han Chinese society and didn’t warrant an autonomous zone (Shao, pp. 210–11).

  A Jesuit priest who accompanied the emperor Verbiest, p. 75.

  Chapter 5: The Waking of Insects

  An English traveler passing through in 1903 found Simpson (writing as Putnam Weale), p. 431.

  The old walled city was made of wood Fogel, p. 255. The poet was Omachi Keigetsu. Fogel notes that it was one of a number of recurring expressions aimed at familiarizing a foreign place by nativizing it (like “the Paris of the Orient,” “the New York of Asia,” etc.). But there was no suggestion here of an imperialistic tone: “since Kyoto, especially in winter, was revered by Japanese as the quintessence of beauty, this was extremely high (perhaps exaggerated) praise for Jilin.”

  In the late nineteenth century, an English explorer Younghusband, p. 43. I loved his account, which felt like a portal directly to the past—in part because, at the New York Public Library, I was the first person since 1918 to check the book out. It looked, felt, and smelled of its age. He writes “to many another kindred spirit, who shares with me that love for adventure and seeking out the unknown which has grown up within me. The great pleasure in writing is to feel that it is possible, by this means, to reach such men; to . . . pass on to others about to start on careers of adventure, the same keen love of travel and of Nature which I have received from those who have gone before.”

  Chapter 6: Grain Rain

  In 2010, 65 percent of China’s “mass incidents” Landesa. Its seventeen-province survey, published in 2012, visited 1,791 villages and found that 43 percent had experienced forced appropriations of arable land for commercial use since 1990, when China began allowing developers to operate. It estimated that the land of four million rural residents was taken annually.

  Dr. Liu suggested they be among the first China observes international standards for organic certification, requiring third-party verification that the food was grown genetically unmodified—without artificial fertilizer, herbicides, or insecticide—in soil tested for residue heavy metals.

  In 2010 the results of a countrywide soil survery Ministry of Environmental Protection, quoted from Wong. In early 2013 the Ministry’s book Soil Pollution and Physical Health said that “more than 13 million tons of crops harvested each year were contaminated with heavy metals, and that 22 million acres of farmland were affected by pesticides.” It estimated that one-sixth of arable land was polluted.

  The official who announced eight million acres were unfit for farming was Wang Shiyuan, vice minister of land resources.

  In early 2014 the government “China Alerted by Serious Soil Pollution, Vows Better Protection,” Xinhua, April 17, 2014. The report was issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Land Resources, based on a study done from April 2005 to December 2013.

  Chapter 7: The Pilgrims’ Progress

  Its cities’ new skylines notwithstanding In 2013 the World Bank commended China for being the first developing country to lift half its population out of poverty. Estimates of the number of impoverished vary. China’s news agency reported State Council statistics that said the figure fell from 166 million at the end of 2010 to “98.99 million now” (“UN Official Praises China’s Poverty Reduction,” Xinhua, October 17, 2013).

  I have not words to express to you the multitude of mosquitoes James, quoted in Lee, p. 5.

  To combat the bloodsuckers Uttered by Father de La Brunière, quoted in Simpson (Putnam Weale). James quote in Lee, p. 5.

  On his 1886 expedition Younghusband, p. 12.

  If any one is missing Du Halde, p. 98.

  Travelers disappeared into the region’s forests Ibid., p. 96.

  Considering the sights on this leg one hundred years later, Younghusband p. 12.

  An English consul traveling to Jilin city Hosie, p. 23.

  A Chinese miner who struck it rich Lee, p. 92.

  One brigand, named Ma the Crazy Ibid., p. 94.

  In the nineteenth century, the late-summer rainy season Reardon-Anderson, p. 112.

  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.

&nb
sp; 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”Ibid., 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.

  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).