At length the Christmas sun rises glowing red, and the ice flowers vanish from the windows. Here, where the winter cold is so piercing, it is oppressively hot in summer. Our little toy train crosses a river several times on fragile bridges of beams, which seem as though they might at any moment collapse like a house of cards. Small strips of tilled land, creaking ox-carts on the deeply rutted roads, tiny Buddhist oratories, primitive stations with long rows of trucks of fuel, a country house or two—that is all that is to be seen the whole day, until late in the evening we arrive at Mukden.
Manchuria is one of the dependencies of China. The Russians constructed a railway through the country to the fortress of Port Arthur, but, as is well known, the Japanese succeeded in capturing the fortress during the war. By the peace of Portsmouth,[19] concluded in September 1905, the Japanese acquired Port Arthur, the adjacent commercial port of Dalny, with the surrounding district, the southern half of the large island Sakhalin, the supremacy over Korea, together with the South Manchurian Railway—so that the Russians had unknowingly built this railway for the benefit of their enemies.
Round Mukden was fought the greatest battle of the whole Russo-Japanese War. The contest lasted twenty days; more than 850,000 men and 2500 guns were engaged, and 120,000 were left dead on the field. On March 1, 1905, the whole Japanese army began to move, and formed at last a ring round the Russians and Mukden. Thus the Japanese became for the time being the masters of Manchuria, but on the conclusion of peace the country was handed back to China.
The life in the singular streets of Mukden is varied and attractive. The Manchus seem a vigorous and self-confident people; they are taller than the Chinese, but wear Chinese dress with fur caps on their heads. The women seldom appear out of doors; they wear their hair gathered up in a high knot on the crown, and, in contrast to the Chinese women, do not deform their feet. Among the swarming crowds one sees Chinamen, merchants, officers, and soldiers in semi-European fur-lined uniforms, policemen in smart costumes with bright buttons, Japanese, Mongols, and sometimes a European. Tramcars drawn by horses jingle through the broader streets. The houses are fine and solidly built, with carved dragons and painted sculpture, paper lanterns and advertisements, and a confusion of black Chinese characters on vertically hanging signs. At the four points of the compass there are great town gates in the noble Chinese architecture, but outside stretches a bare and dreary plain full of grave mounds.
In Pe-ling, or "Northern Tomb," rests the first Chinese Emperor of the Manchu dynasty, and his son, the great Kang Hi, who reigned over the Middle Kingdom for sixty-one years. Pe-ling consists of several temple-like buildings. The visitor first enters a hall containing an enormous tortoise of stone, which supports a stone tablet inscribed with an epitaph extolling the deceased Emperor. At the farthest extremity of the walled park is the tomb itself, a huge mass of stone with a curved roof. In a pavilion just in front of this building the Emperor of China is wont to perform his devotions when he visits the graves of his fathers. Solemn peace reigns in the park, and under the pine-trees stone elephants, horses, and camels gaze solemnly at one another.
From Mukden Port Arthur is an easy eight hours' railway journey south-westwards; and it is only an hour and a half more to Dalny, which in Japanese hands has grown to a large and important commercial town.
The Trans-Siberian Railway
On December 28, 1908, we stepped into the train in Dalny, and commenced a railway journey which lasted without a break for eleven days.
First we have to go back to Mukden, and then a somewhat shorter journey to the last Japanese station. At the next the stationmaster is a Russian, and Russian guards replace the Japanese. In the afternoon the train draws up at Kharbin on the Sungari River, a tributary of the great Amur. It was towards Kharbin that the Russians slowly retired after their defeat, and on this very platform Prince Ito, the first Japanese Resident-General of Korea, was murdered barely a year later.
At Kharbin we have to wait two hours for the international express, which runs twice a week from Vladivostock to Moscow.