So I asked about the Chinese presence instead. A century ago Blagoveshchensk and Heihe (“Black River” in Chinese) on the far bank were the chief conduit of exchange—and misunderstanding—between the two empires. Since 1989, when Heihe was opened again as a free customs port, the two towns resumed their former trade links. In Blagoveshchensk, I hoped to learn something about the two countries’ day-to-day relations.
“There’s eight million Russians in the Russian Far East,” said Vasily. “And the same number of Chinese. That is not what the government tells you, but it’s what everybody says. I believe them, because I can see with my own two eyes. The Chinese, they’re everywhere—on the streets, on the building sites, in the fields doing the farm work. Everywhere.”
I had heard something similar time and again, in Irkutsk, in Chita, and in Skovorodino. In Irkutsk, I had found Chinese traders in stalls around the old market, selling electronics and shoddy stuff—toys, cheap clothes. But that was hardly different from anywhere else in the world. On the streets, what had struck me was how few Chinese there were, given that 1.3 billion of them lived in the neighboring country, 90 million of them in the Chinese northeast, south of the Amur, in what used to be called Manchuria. Vasily had an answer for that: “You don’t see them in the center of the city because they’re always lurking: on the edges, in the fields, everywhere.” I let the matter lie. I asked about the other side, Heihe. Vasily and Marina snorted. All bright lights and fine buildings along the riverfront, they said. “But it’s a Potemkin village,” said Marina, “paid for by Beijing, just to make the Russians looking across at it feel miserable.”
“It’s just for show,” Vasily said, with finality. “Inland, they don’t even have electricity.”
• • •
Blagoveshchensk is laid out, American-wise, in the form of a grid. I walked the mile or two from the station into town, in search of the river. The streets were wide, and in between low, dilapidated Soviet-era blocks were once-fine buildings of red brick and dressed stone. But the place was eerily quiet—nothing much seemed to happen here. I reached the water. The Amur here was perhaps a third of a mile across, and it slid away toward a bend, at which, on the Russian bank, the Zeia joined it, forming the downstream boundary of Blagoveshchensk. On the waterfront near the ferry terminal was the triumphal arch for Czarevich Nicholas, thrown up in 1891, torn down by the Soviets, and recently restored. A few Chinese with large bundles were coming out of the ferry terminal and past the arch, heading into the town. A few hundred yards up the quay, past the former residence of the Imperial Russian military governor, a tired old Soviet gunboat had at some point been hauled out of its element. It was set at an angle on a concrete ramp as if it were about to leap the Amur, and its gun was pointed meaningfully at China.
Heihe lay in full view on the far side of the Amur. From a distance, it looked just like any other midsize Chinese town I had seen: that is to say, a bland line of semi-high-rise buildings with blue windows, interspersed with the municipal bombast beloved of the Communist Party for their offices, law courts, and karaoke palaces: turrets, classical columns, and gilt flourishes. It all looked a good deal more prosperous than the shabby town I was standing in, and a Ferris wheel was turning. If a Potemkin village, it was a rather impressive one.
I turned back and followed the Chinese from the ferry terminal. The Chinese market was set several blocks back, a large covered space. Inside were dozens of stalls selling jeans, knee boots, fake-fur-lined jackets. Customers were few, and the traders sat about disconsolately. Business was bad, said one, because Russians had no money, and because the Russian customs slapped high duties on Chinese traders when they were not shaking them down for bribes. He was thinking of returning home—it was not worth all the trouble: many Russians, he said, treated Chinese like dirt, and from the police came regular harrassment.
“I thought Chinese liked to come here,” I said, muttering something about the standard of living, and remembering tales of awestruck Chinese who had never seen a fridge till they crossed the Amur.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
• • •
A century and a bit ago, the young city of Blagoveshchensk had so much going for it, a hopeful town on an expanding frontier, a glorious river in front and goldfields behind, capitalist-adventurers willing to risk a buck, and a cheap pool of willing Chinese labor. A contemporary American traveler made the comparison with the American West explicit, with all the prosperity that came from an unrolling frontier. The wide streets of Blagoveshchensk, he said, were as fine a site for the leading banks and stores as were those of Portland, Oregon. In a different vein, Anton Chekhov enthused about the Japanese prostitute in whom he sought solace after a cramped, bone-jarring trip by river steamer from Sretensk. The girl’s room was neat and tidy and free of “washbasins or objects made out of rubber or portraits of generals.” And, Chekhov wrote with his almost pathological honesty, “when you climax, the Japanese girl picks up a piece of cloth from out of her sleeve with her teeth, catches hold of your ‘old man,’ . . . and somewhat unexpectedly wipes you down, while the cloth tickles your tummy.” Japanese on the Amur: this was a new development in the late nineteenth century, and surprising to think of, even today.
Across the river from Blagoveshchensk, a quarter of a mile away, lay the Manchu town of Sakhalian, as Heihe was known then. The town had opened to foreign trade in 1858, as soon as the Sino-Russian border was fixed down the middle of the Amur River. Especially after the Manchurian gold rush began in the early 1880s, Sakhalian had not looked back. The town supplied Blagoveshchensk with provisions, trading goods, and boundless labor. By 1900 a quarter of Blagoveshchensk’s population was Chinese. Though a number of merchants ran businesses in Blagoveshchensk, and one or two had even converted to Russian Orthodoxy and taken Russian citizenship, most Chinese in Blagoveshchensk were coolies. Beyond the town Chinese worked the land. Exchange between Sakhalian and Blagoveshchensk was brisk. Residents crossed freely between both towns, by junk and skiff in summer or across the ice in winter. Today, Heihe remains the chief conduit for Chinese goods into Russia. Ferries ply the river in summer, full of Chinese petty traders hefting cardboard boxes. Barges carry Chinese-made diggers across to Blagoveshchensk. In winter a fleet of small hovercraft buzzes back and forth.
• • •
In the summer of 1900 events erupting in Peking set in train acts so appalling that Blagoveshchensk is incapable of acknowledging them today. In May that year reports of unrest in the southern parts of Manchuria began to trickle into peaceable Blagoveshchensk. Few thought much of it. Disorder and violence were quotidians for Russians building or guarding the South Manchurian Railway.
At that time, it was a commonplace to think of the Chinese not as conscious citizens of a state in the modern sense, but as listless members of an old and rotting civilization, the Sick Man of the East. It somehow justified the imperial race to slice up China into Western, Russian, and, later, Japanese spheres of influence. The British were pushing their commercial and consular interests deep into the Yangzi basin. They took over Weihaiwei, a strategic port on the Shandong peninsula on the northern coast. And in 1898 Britain extorted out of the Qing a ninety-nine-year lease on a large tract of land north of Hong Kong, the “New Territories.” An attack on missionaries gave Germany the pretext to seize the port of Qingdao in Shandong. The French demanded special rights in China’s southern and southwestern provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan adjoining their Vietnam colony, as well as on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. The Japanese, who humiliated China in a war in 1894 over Korea, took Taiwan as booty and were now pressing into central China. The Russians occupied the Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria with its superb natural harbor, Lushun, or Port Arthur.
To its patriots, China under the Manchus was being “carved up like a melon.” In 1900 foreign arrogance and a craven dynasty provoked a Chinese popular response, bizarre and dramatic: the Boxer Re
bellion. It was a largely spontaneous uprising. Its participants called themselves the Boxers United in Righteousness, or the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists. The movement had emerged in Shandong in 1898, at a time of floods interspersed with droughts; of hunger, banditry, and a debilitating addiction of many Chinese to opium. The martial rites the Boxers practiced were adopted from the secret societies and self-defense units that had spread as a response to banditry and the provocations of Western evangelists. (Christian converts had legal immunity from prosecution, and numbers of working bandits had flocked to the churches and the protection of foreigners.) The Boxers were lightly armed, but in combat, when possessed by spirits, they considered themselves invulnerable to bullets, cannon shot, and knife attack. They believed that they could call on millions of “spirit soldiers” to descend from heaven and purge China of the baneful foreign influence. Recruited from the ranks of flood-stricken farmers and day laborers, itinerants, peddlers, boatmen, and rickshaw pullers, the Boxers began to attack and kill missionaries and Christian converts and burn churches, spreading alarm among foreigners who demanded that the Qing put down the movement. The Boxers countered with a slogan that spread like wildfire: “Revive the Qing, destroy the foreign.” The Boxers called foreigners yang guizi, sea demons.
By now, the Boxer movement had swollen and taken on a millenarian cast. A male membership was joined by groups of women. The Red Lanterns Shining were teenagers whose female powers could fight the debilitating “pollution” of Christian women. A group called the Cooking-Pan Lanterns fed the Boxer troops from pots that filled magically after each meal.
In June 1900 Boxers began drifting into Peking, roaming the streets in bright turbans and red leggings in search of Christian converts to attack, or Chinese who owned foreign clocks or even matches. Westerners were also killed. The Qing court vacillated between protecting foreigners and applauding the Boxer force for its antiforeign patriotism. Foreigners took their defense into their own hands, and a reinforcement of four hundred troops from eight countries arrived in the capital. Then the Boxers tore up the railway that ran from Tianjin, the nearest port, and a Western force, two thousand strong this time, was attacked and beaten back.
Soon thousands of Boxers were swarming through the walled city of Peking, and churches and cathedrals were ablaze. When foreign soldiers shot several of the braves, the capital’s population turned against the foreign presence. Foreign troops seized the Dagu forts that controlled the sea approach to Tianjin. In Peking, the Boxers laid siege to the foreign-legation district. The bumpkin rebels were now, the empress dowager made clear, a loyal militia.
Back in Blagoveshchensk people paid little attention to the news from Peking and the reports of growing attacks on Russian interests on the Liaodong peninsula—instead, readers consumed newspaper reports of the Boer War in southern Africa. Russians would not comprehend that the Boxer uprising was directed against them too. Unlike the other Western powers, Russia and China shared a long land border, and more than two centuries of diplomatic relations had led Russians to believe they were somehow apart from the other imperialists. In private, plenty of Russian diplomats and senior soldiers expressed disdain for the Western capitalists and missionaries (“spiritual businessmen”) crawling over China.
Yet toward the end of May 1900, snatches of martial music from Sakhalian began to carry across on the breeze. Russians who had crossed over to buy cattle came back with the news that seven thousand troops were camped in the low hills behind the town. Their presence was dismissed as routine Manchu maneuvers. It was not until June 24, and news of an expeditionary force on its way to relieve foreigners in the capital, that a sense of crisis reached the border town. Posters plastered around Blagoveshchensk ordered a general mobilization, but it was not even clear against whom the mobilization was directed: militarist Japan, perhaps, against whom Russia and China had a defensive alliance. Despite the rumors of Boxers now drifting into Blagoveshchensk, how could anyone take these rebels seriously? “So accustomed had everyone become to looking on China and the Chinese with utter disdain,” one of the town’s residents later wrote, “and so familiar had their cowardice become to all inhabitants along the border, that there was hardly anyone who expected a serious war with China.”
Yet in Blagoveshchensk Chinese were starting to feel the brunt. When vodka-fueled Russians in uniform took randomly to beating up Chinese on usually peaceable streets, the governor closed down the drinking dives and threatened arrest for anyone spreading false rumors. The Amurski Krai, the local newspaper, urged Russians to ensure good relations with the town’s Chinese population, whose “work and peaceful activity assist the historical course of our cultural mission.”
By now, Chinese living on the Russian side were crossing in large numbers to Sakhalian. Merchants were transferring their capital to Chinese banks or exchanging rubles for gold, while cooks demanded their pay up front. It was not just the random Russian violence in the town. The Chinese knew things the Russians did not, and merchants were telling their Russian counterparts in the Upper Amur Company to expect hostilities. They said that Manchu soldiers had replaced Chinese civilians living along the Zeia. Chinese soldiers dressed in civvies had also, they said, passed up to Mohe, on Russian steamers. The rumors made many Russians keen to leave, but the summer rains had not arrived, and river steamers lay stranded on the sandbanks. Townsfolk took to firing their rifles into the night before turning in for bed. But as if to reinforce the sense that the troubles lay elsewhere, most of the Blagoveshchensk garrison, along with horses, fodder, and matériel, were loaded onto steamers and barges. On July 12, after a day of civic speeches and military bands, blessings and gun salutes, the flotilla departed for Khabarovsk. Crowds on the far bank also watched as Blagoveshchensk gaily sent off its defenders.
Just two days later, an ominous incident occurred. The steamer Mikhail was coming up from Khabarovsk with five barges in tow, one carrying guns and shells. As she breasted the Manchu garrison town of Aigun, a few miles downstream from Sakhalian, the Chinese flagged the Mikhail and told her to dock, emphasizing the order with gunfire. Chinese officials boarded the steamer and pronounced her under arrest. Agreeing to go ashore to discuss the matter, Captain Krivtsev and a crew were grabbed and led away to Aigun. Hours after this, a second Russian steamboat was nosing upstream when the Mikhail sounded its whistle. Onboard the Selenga was a border commander, a Colonel Kolshmit. He had the Selenga brought alongside the Mikhail. Shouting from the bank, the Chinese demanded that the colonel come ashore too. Kolshmit refused. Seeing that the Chinese were armed, Kolshmit gave the order for both boats to press on ahead under full steam. The Chinese opened fire. The shells ranged far beyond the vessels, but as the Amur fairway curved in toward the Chinese bank, Chinese rifles hit and killed Kolshmit, four Cossacks, and two crew. The helmsman, shot in both legs, continued to steer on his knees.
This became known as the Amur Incident. News of it raced through Blagoveshchensk that Saturday evening. The city council and the military governor of the Amur region, Lieutenant-General Konstantin Gribskii, organized the town’s defense with the few remaining regulars bolstered by volunteers, many of them as yet unarmed. Yet none of this was enough to upset the town’s rhythm on a deliciously warm, clear Sunday. Much of the town was taking its afternoon stroll along the promenade. The reservists, too, were in holiday mood. Some hundreds of them ran down the shingle strand at the edge of the town to swim and splash about.
At that point, rifle fire rang out from the far bank, and then artillery. Blagoveshchensk was in sudden mayhem, all illusions of peace now shattered. Citizens in their Sunday finery fled down the broad streets running perpendicular to the river. The waterfront houses emptied of people. In the rush to disembark from steamers, people tumbled into the river. This fleeing crowd ran into another coming the other way: volunteers who had collected rifles and cartridges in city hall. They were a motley bunch, and emplacements had not even been prepared for
the town’s two guns. The disarray was reinforced by rumors of a Chinese landing. One steamer that had left shortly before the bombardment attempted to turn back but lay stranded on a sandbank, where she remained for the rest of the hostilities. Other steamers ran for the Zeia River. By now the shelling had killed some of the flaneurs and swimmers. Civilians were pouring out of town, carrying what they could.
As dark came, the Chinese bombardment fell quiet. The defenders dug foxholes and trenches along the waterfront, using shovels from their vegetable patches.
The next morning Boxer proclamations were found everywhere in the Chinese quarter, calling on Blagoveshchensk’s Chinese to join a Manchu landing intended that night. (Or so people said: few Russians read Chinese.) And so Gribskii, the military governor, who shortly before had pledged that no harm would come to foreigners on Russian soil, ordered every single Chinese in the town and its environs to be rounded up and deported to Manchuria. In the event, the method of their deportation was less than orthodox.
Reservists and vigilante civilians joined the police for the roundup. Chinese who attempted to run were beaten. Chinese stores were ransacked. Late in the afternoon, townsfolk saw a great column of people making their way from the countryside into the city. These were not the feared Manchus; nor were they the relief force from Sretensk. Rather, they were all the Chinese, 1,500 of them, who lived in the countryside around Blagoveshchensk and who were being corralled into town by Cossacks brandishing whips. Several thousand Chinese and Manchus were under guard near the police station. Many thought themselves safer this way, protected from lynch mobs.
Black Dragon River Page 27
