Russian Manchuria

alternative obsolete Russian Manchooria

1. The part of Russia near northeastern China (including Primorsky Krai and other nearby areas) which was annexed by the Russian Empire in the mid 19th century and understood as part of Manchuria.First known use mid-19th c.

   Vladivostock, the most southern port of Russian Manchuria, is icebound for six months out of every twelve, and hence the absorbing desire of the authorities to advance so far southward as to secure a good and open harbour.

   1889 January, “The Defensive Policy of China”, in Edinburgh Review or Critical Review, number CCCXLV, →OCLC, page 180

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   On Saturday, the 4th of August, we steamed to the outer harbour of Olga Bay, after spending four days under sail on our passage from Nakhodka Harbour, a distance of about 120 miles. This is another of the many beautiful harbours that fringe the coast of Russian Manchuria. It is formed of an outer and inner, or as it is called the “careening” harbour, within which lies the settlement.

   1867 [1867 June 24], W. V. Lloyd, “Notes on the Russian Harbours on the Coast of Manchuria.”, in The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London, volume 37, London: John Murray, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 229

   In 1866, Her Majesty’s ship Scylla, Captain Courtenay, left Nagasaki, Japan, on the 20th of July, with orders to visit the different Russian settlements on the coast of Manchuria, and we are indebted to the Rev. W. V. Lloyd for an excellent account of the trip, given in the thirty-seventh volume of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society—an account which is further illustrated by a map of Russian Manchuria.

   1868 October, “The Russians in Manchuria”, in New Monthly Magazine, volume CXLIII, number DLXXVIV, page 377

   SAGHALIN, or SAKHALIN, is the name improperly given to a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45° 57' and 54° 24' N. lat. and 141° 30' and 144° 50' E. long., off the coast of Russian Manchuria. Its proper name is Karaftu, or Karafuto.

   1886, “SAGHALIN, or SAKHALIN”, in The Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, volume XXI, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, page 147, column 1

   THE chief object of my visit to Russian Manchuria was to settle for myself by personal investigation the vexed question of the condition of those Koreans who have found shelter under the Russian flag, a number estimated in Seoul at 20,000.[…] When China ceded to Russia in 1860 the region which we call Russian Manchuria, she probably did so in ignorance of its vast agricultural capacities and mineral wealth.[…] Grass, timber, water, coal, minerals, a soil as rich as the prairies of Illinois, and a climate not only favorable to agriculture but to human health, all await the settler, and the broad, unoccupied, and fertile lands which Russian Manchuria offers are clamoring for inhabitants.

   1898, Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors, Yonsei University Press, published 1970, →OCLC, pages 223, 242-243

   MANCHURIA, man-cho͞oʹre-a (the land of the Manchus). The northeastern part of the Chinese Empire, situated east of Mongolia and the Argun River (which formerly traversed Manchurian territory), south of the Amur River (which separates it from Siberia), and west of the Usuri, which separates it from Primorsk (Maritime Province) or Russian Manchuria (a Chinese possession until 1860).

   1906, “Manchuria”, in The New International Encyclopaedia, volume XII, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, page 782, column 1

2. The part of Manchuria (in northeast China) controlled during some periods by Russia or the USSR.

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   On August 11, 1908, the administrative Government at Mukden had made an agreement providing for the use of American capital amounting to one hundred million dollars for a "Manchurian Bank", and the building of a railway extension from Tsitsihar to Aigun, in Russian-Manchuria, completing a line to Tsitsihar from Kinchou on the Gulf of Chihli, the construction of which she had assigned to the British contractors, Pauling and Company.

   [1917 March, Frederick McCormick, “Second Line of Defense”, in The Menace of Japan, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, →OCLC, page 104

   Then again, in 1909, she abolished the free-trade system in her Far Eastern possessions, and began to impose a heavy duty on goods entering them from Manchuria. The blow to the prosperity of Russian Manchuria and especially to that of Harbin was severe and immediate. The city, it is said, almost seemed dead at one time.

   1921, “Manchuria Since 1905”, in Economic History of Manchuria, Seoul, Chosen, →OCLC, page 73

   In February 1904 the Japanese attacked Russian naval vessels at Port Arthur in Russian Manchuria. The cause of the war was ostensibly a disagreement over the recognition of spheres of influence in China, but the Japanese were really fighting to establish their status as a Great Power, and at least part of the Russian motive for allowing negotiations to end in war was the desire of certain members of the Russian government, in the words of Plehve, the interior minister, for ‘a short, victorious war that would stem the tide of revolution’ in Russia itself.

   1975, Michael Edwardes, “The end of the Game”, in Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War, London: Hamish Hamilton, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 159

   Shattered and demoralized, the Russians were unable to prevent the Japanese Army from crossing into Korea and then over the northern frontier at the Yalu River into Russian Manchuria. General Kuropatkin, the Russian local field commander, found himself defending the north-south line of the Harbin to Port Arthur railway against substantial Japanese forces advancing from the Yalu to the east.

   1993, H. M. Tillotson, “Mannerheim”, in Finland at Peace and War, 1918-1993, Michael Russell, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 25

   Simpson’s visit left him “thoughtful and a little sad. Harbin is the very center of Manchuria ... a place which will be reached for at all costs by the enemy. Who is to conquer in the climax of national anger, hatred and greed, which must come some day and tear this fair country?” He hoped the battle would be won by numbers alone: 30,000 Russians lived in Harbin alongside 250,000 Chinese. “Russian Manchuria is something of a myth made possible by a gigantic bluff,” he wrote. “It is a remnant of 1900 and China under foreign occupation. Even if there is no force used, Chinese ingenuity alone may push Russia back to the Amur [River].” Instead it was the Japanese who did the pushing, at least from Port Arthur, at the southern tip of Manchuria, to Harbin in the far north. After the armies of eight Western nations occupied Beijing in 1901 to break a siege of foreign embassies by rebels known as the Boxers, Russia kept an enormous force—177,000 soldiers—in Manchuria long after the other armies had withdrawn. In 1903, Bertram Lenox Simpson arrived in Jilin city to see the Russian tricolor flying and Russian troops patrolling the streets and running the telegraph office. Simpson predicted that Russia’s position in Manchuria would overextend the czar’s army and drain his treasury.

   2015, Michael Meyer, “To the Manchuria Station!”, in In Manchuria: A Village called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, Bloomsbury Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 115–116