To-day, 564 years after the passing of the greatest empire the world has ever seen into nothing more than the vaguest sort of nightmare, we face this outstanding fact: More than 90 per cent. of the total population of the present-day Manchuria are the descendants of the humble Chinese who stole into the country.

Just what, then, was their weapon which proved ever so much more powerful than the sword? It was not the pen, certainly. Most of the Chinese coolie founders of the agricultural empire of Manchuria could not write their own names. There is no miracle connected with their achievement, either. The answer is as simple as it is apparent. It was the ability of the Chinese coolie to live on cheap, coarse food-such food as is given to cattle in other lands-the Manchurian millet called kaoliang, beans, and pickled vegetables. Not only that but thriving on it. Even to this very day the physique, the power of physical endurance, of the Chinese coolie is the eternal wonder of the Japanese. Beside the Chinese coolie the Japanese workmen are pale and puny. With all the sensational and scandalous rise in living expenses in the Far East in recent years, I found, last year, the coolies in Manchuria were living on seven cents a day. When the Chinese entered Manchuria they walked with the furtive steps of a thief. Indeed, they were lawbreakers-criminals in the eyes of the Manchu law. They bowed in the dust before the Manchu landlord: got the job of a petty farm laborer. Their one passion seemed to be patient, eternal toil. Nothing stopped

financial power. But they When their Manchu landthey spoke, for they were When the land changed

them in their work. And in that manner they laid the foundation of economic and never made speeches over it. lords wished to lease the land ready to put up the money. hands, it was from the hand of the original Manchu

owner into that of a Chinese tenant farmer. Settled on their own piece of land, they called across the Yellow Sea to their kinfolk whom they had left in their home villages in Shantung. The kinfolk came and joined them. The history of the Agricultural Development of Manchuria is merely the story of the Shantung Coolie, nothing more.

ENTER CHINESE MERCHANTS, ALSO

The Chinese merchants from Chihli followed the farmers from Shantung into Manchuria. Unlike the penniless coolie farm laborers, these merchants had their main stores in the various cities of the Metropolitan Province of Chihli. They entered Manchuria and there opened many branch stores at various important towns and cities. These stores carried almost all the simple life necessities of the Chinese farmer, so that he could step into one of them and get all his needs supplied at one shop. These stores also carried cotton goods, patent medicines, and other articles in answer to the demands of Manchu natives. In no time at all they were the masters of Manchurian markets. And as masters they have continued ever since in the face of other nationals entering, led by Russians and Japanese in recent years.

The Shantungese who crossed over to Manchuria were not all farmers. A large number of them went up the Yalu into the Changpai mountains for the secret gathering of ginseng. While hunting for the precious herb many of them stumbled on gold-bearing alluvium in the Chiapikou district. The miners and ginseng-hunters built up the flourishing community of more than 25,000 people at Chiapikou, in the heart of the mountain.

MANCHURIA OFFICIALLY OPENED TO CHINESE

IMMIGRATION

In 1803 under Emperor Chiaching one section of Manchuria was officially opened to Chinese immigration. Under the same Emperor the Chinese in Manchuria gained legal status of a sort and were graduated from the outlaw class. And in 1813 even the Bannermen in outlying districts were placed under the prefectual administration, which governed the Chinese and Manchus alike. In 1852 the law was promulgated which granted to the Chinese free and legal purchase and sale of properties with the Manchu, so that a Chinese could buy a piece of land from a Manchu without going through the elaborate fiction of a lease. This law, however, was restricted to China Proper and did not extend to Manchuria. The Manchurian restriction remained more or less effective until 1905, when it was nullified by the Military Governor of Mukden.

Toward the middle of the Nineteenth Century China was in the turmoil of a civil war. To fill her cup of bitterness came also the foreign trouble. The British forced the opium war and walked away with the Treaty of Nanking of August, 1842, and the island Hongkong. In less than twenty years after that, in 1860, the allied forces of France and Britain marched into Peking, and the Court fled to Jehol. The Peking Government had no time to think of Manchuria, let alone bother with the Chinese immigration there. When the Central Government at Peking thought of Manchuria at all it was in terms of getting some funds out of it.

The Peking treasury had been so repeatedly and riotously squeezed and pumped, because of both civil wars and foreign wars, that it looked about as nourishing as a dried-up drinking-hole in the Gobi desert. A bright idea struck the Peking statesmen: Why not dig revenue

out of the virgin soils of North Manchuria? In 1860 the Military Governor of Amur Province opened up the Hulan plain. The whole western plain of the Kirin Province drained by the Sungari was opened in the following year. And in 1868 the proposal of opening the Imperial preserve, the most exclusive of all the exclusive territories in Manchuria, was finally approved. While all these different sections of Manchuria were being thrown open anarchy and bandits were sweeping the provinces of Chihli and Shantung. And to the people of the two suffering provinces the open door of Manchuria looked like the Pearly Gates standing ajar before their eyes while the flames were raging at their backs.

This time it was a flood tide of Chinese refugees, chiefly from the densely congested provinces of Chihli and Shantung, that broke on Manchuria-coolies, merchants, scholars; men and women of all types and all social grades.

In 1875 the military governor at Mukden took away! all the legal fences between the Manchu and the Chinese residing in Manchuria and placed them on entire equality in the eyes of the law. And in 1878 the military governor of Kirin actually opened a colonial development bureau and publicly invited Chinese farmers to come and open up the very heart of Manchuria.

The victory of the despised Chinese was thus complete.

1

CHAPTER IV

THE COMING OF THE RUSSIAN

THE Treaty of Nerchinsk of September, 1689, was the first treaty China signed with a European power. It was with Russia. The Peking Government appointed two Catholic missionaries, Père Gerbillon and Thomas Pereyra, a Hollander, to accompany their delegation as interpreters. They were the real spokesmen and negotiators on the Chinese side. At this first historic meeting it was the Middle Kingdom which dictated and Russia that bowed. This treaty brought Russia definitely on the northern boundary of Manchuria, however, along the Amur and on the Argun River.

One hundred and sixty-nine years later Muravieff— he who became famous as the prophet of the highwayman policy of Russian imperialism in the Far East-appeared at Aigun. He had carefully draped the Amur with more than 12,000 Cossacks at various strategic points along the great stream. Standing against that background, he forced, and with comparative ease, from the distracted Peking Mandarins the now famous Aigun Treaty of May, 1858. It handed over to Russia the whole vast empire north of the Amur River. This time it was not the mere geographical approach of a neighbor power that Manchuria felt: she darkened under the shadow of a beast of prey with a thirst for blood and territory which was thoroughly modern, European, not at all like the classical appetite of mythological monsters in the mountain caves of old China.

In 1859 General Ignatieff entered Peking as the Russian Minister. In the fall of 1860 the allied forces of