26. Russian Culture in Manchuria and the Memoirs of Valery Pereleshin

Abstract

W hen Anton Che khov sailed eastward by riverboat on the Amur during his trip to Sakhalin (Amur then marked, as it still does, the border between China and Siberia), he was struck by the abundant wildlife and sparse population. In his letter to Aleksei Suvorin, 27 June 1890, he wrote: “Cliffs, crags, forests, thousands of ducks, herons and all sorts of long-beaked rascals, and utter wilderness. The Russian bank is on the left, the Chinese on the right. If I feel like it, I can look at Russia, and if I feel like it, I can look at China. China is as barren and savage as Russia: villages and sentinel huts are few and far between.”2 Even though China had been ruled for centuries by Manchu emperors, the homeland of that dynasty, Manchuria, was a vast nature preserve with far fewer towns and villages than the area could accommodate. In 1896 the Russian government obtained permission from the Chinese to construct, through Manchuria, a continuation of the TransSiberian Railroad to Vladivostok. This was the Chinese Eastern Railway. A bit later, a southern branch was constructed toward the Russian towns of Dalny (Дальний; Dairen after the Russo-Japanese War, now Dalian in China) and Port Arthur, on the Liaotung peninsula by the Yellow Sea. Because of all this vast railroad construction, thousands of people of various nationalities who inhabited the Russian Empire moved to Manchuria. In 1898 a settlement was founded at the point of intersection of the eastern railroad branch and the wide river Sungari, a tributary of the Amur.3