“Like vultures,” writes one historian, “the European powers now clawed for their own cut of the carcass.”591 And Russia, not least. As it moved into position between 1892 and 1895, almost 400 miles a year on the average were built on the new railway; and after the Japanese attack on China, construction pressed urgently forward with 836 miles in 1895. The difficult Circumbaikal section was indefinitely delayed, and large icebreakers capable of ferrying entire trains with all their passengers across the lake were commissioned from British dockyards to bridge the gap. The first such vessel produced, appropriately called the Baikal, was 290 feet long, 57 feet wide, and displaced 4,200 tons.
Her hull, belted with inch-thick steel plates and reinforced by a two-foot inner sheathing of timber, was designed to crunch through three to four feet of ice. She could accommodate the coaches of an entire express train, or from twenty-five to twenty-eight fully loaded freight cars, on three pairs of rails parallel with the keel. Above this deck, a towering superstructure contained a luxurious lounge and a buffet; cabins for a hundred and fifty first- and second-class passengers; a special suite for consequential dignitaries; a chapel; quarters for ships’ officers and crew; and deck space for six hundred and fifty persons in third class.592
If any vessel could make up for the lack of a Circumbaikal section, the Baikal was surely it, especially in conjunction with a smaller sister ship, the Angara. Meanwhile, instead of the proposed Amur Railway to link the Transbaikal and Ussuri lines, an alternative route through Manchuria to Vladivostok was chosen, subsequently known as the Chinese Eastern Railway. Despite initial expectations, the Amur had never lived up to its promise as a granary, and disillusionment had set in. The region was still largely uninhabited, and (as Chekhov described it in June 1890) an “utter wilderness.”593
To the south, Manchuria (China’s northernmost province) emerged as a “rich economic and strategic prize.” It had the ice-free ports of Port Arthur and Talienwan, which the Japanese had almost gained, but also gold, iron, and coal, grasslands with thriving cattle, and a fertile soil. By means of the proposed railway (which would shorten the Trans-Siberian by 350 miles) Russia therefore began the takeover of Manchuria “by commercial subterfuge.”594 Having appeared (in conjunction with Germany and France) to defend Chinese territorial integrity, Russia now offered Peking a loan toward the payment of its indemnity obligations (which it was too impoverished to meet without outside help) in return for a railway concession through northern Manchuria 900 miles to Vladivostok. This concession, however, which included the right to secure and defend the railway with armed guards, was not granted directly to the Russian government but to the Russo-Chinese Bank, a private concern conceived by Witte and financed mainly by the French bankers who had facilitated the China loan. The bank in turn transferred the concession to the Chinese Eastern Railway Company, a subsidiary corporation created by Witte and controlled by the Russian Treasury, but with a Chinese diplomat as chairman of the board.
The terms of the concession allowed the railway to operate the line for eighty years, after which it would automatically revert without charge to the Chinese government, although the latter had an option to buy it after just thirty-six years, if it could afford to do so. The terms of the arrangement, however, noted Witte, who had devised them, “were so burdensome that it was highly improbable that the Chinese Government would ever attempt to effect the redemption.”595 This secret agreement between Russia and China (which also included a defensive alliance against Japan) was signed in the spring of 1896, when Li Hung-chang, China’s elderly and notoriously corrupt First Chancellor, attended the coronation in St. Petersburg of Nicholas II.
Taking over the negotiations from Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky, the Foreign Minister, who, Witte remarked sarcastically, “was entirely ignorant of our Far Eastern policy,”596 Witte received the Chinese dignitary in his own office at the Finance Ministry, where everything was settled over a hookah pipe and tea. As a reward for his acquiescence, Li is believed to have received surreptitiously over time about 3 million rubles in bribes.
In an age of railroad imperialism, the Chinese Eastern Railway was an exceptionally bold and clever coup. But in all other respects, it was typical of the way in which the European powers were methodically carving up China. From the various beachheads they established, railways immediately extended their acquisitive arms. By 1898, Belgian financiers were planning track from Peking to Hankow; their German counterparts were capitalizing lines in Shantung Province; the British were forging a line from Shanghai to Nanking; and the French were spiking down railroad ties in the three southern provinces of Kwang-tung, Kwangsi, and Yunnan. The Russo-Chinese Bank was also subsidizing a French branch line to the Belgian track. Not to be left out, an American syndicate had obtained a concession for 1,000 miles of railway from Hankow, the “Chicago of China,” to Canton, the principal seaport in the south. When connected, all these lines would quarter the empire.
Indeed, even before construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway had begun, Germany in the summer of 1897 had seized Kiaochow Bay; Russia responded by occupying Talienwan and Port Arthur, to “protect” China from further German encroachment; Britain landed at Weihaiwei, and France at Kwangchow in the south. The complete disintegration of China seemed at hand. The dual role inadequately filled by Vladivostok as a military and commercial port was now neatly divided by the Russians between Port Arthur, which was turned into a powerful fortress and naval base, and Talienwan (rechristened Dalny, or “Far Away”) – both obtained from China on lease.
In the summer of 1898, thousands of railway construction workers and about three thousand armed escorts, or “Matilda’s Guards,” as they were called after Witte’s wife, marched into the sleepy hamlet of Harbin, on the banks of the Sungari River in north-central Manchuria, and set up the administrative headquarters of the Chinese Eastern line. Under their chief engineer, Alexander Yugovich, they built a kind of pilot line first, rudimentary even by Trans-Siberian standards, to convey laborers and materiel swiftly to the building sites. Then they pushed their track eastward to meet construction crews proceeding from the Ussuri to the west. This required a number of substantial bridges and eight tunnels, including one about two miles long bored through the desolate, windswept Great Khingan Range. Meanwhile, a South Manchurian line, with branches to Port Arthur and Dalny, was also begun.
As elsewhere, severe winter frosts, summer floods, and granite-hard ground created such obstacles that only the most grueling effort could overcome them. This was especially so because all mechanical equipment was lacking, and after stretches of the frozen ground had been blasted loose or thawed by fires, the laborers, having hacked away at the soil with shovels and picks, carried it off in baskets on their backs. Bands of Manchurian outlaws, called hunghutzes (literally, “red beards”), were far more formidable in their own homeland, of course, than along the Ussuri line, and exacted protection money from merchants and traders operating within their domain. River convoys and campsites were also constantly subject to attack. Although they were usually struck by small guerrilla bands, some of the assaults were on a larger scale. Southwest of Harbin, for example, seven hundred red beards completely sacked the town. “Matilda’s Guards” proved insufficient protection against them, and Cossack cavalry squadrons were brought in and set up a system of defense.