with broad, stately avenues. As the town grew, extravagant social life centered about the Railway Club. It stands there to-day. It can still offer a royal feast to its guests. A dinner I had the pleasure of attending last year offered a collection of wines choice enough to make some of our dry American friends brave an ocean journey with a glad heart. But the Club in its spacious grounds seemed to be under a shadow of some unuttered melancholy. When everything Russian went to pieces under the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution the Russian life in Harbin lost its glitter, and the Chinese woke up to find themselves masters over their former Russian lords. While at Harbin I saw a good deal of evidence of how the lowly Chinese had paid back the Russians in their own coin of arrogance and high-handed impudence.

What the town lost in pomp and color it gained in industrial and economic solidity. The Chinese coolies who came up to the north by thousands to work on the railway in the days of its construction, made money, a good deal of it for the Chinese coolie. Many of them stayed on, instead of going back to their starvationhaunted Shantung villages. They took to the cultivation of the soil, to furnish food for the new communities springing up all along the railway line. When the RussoJapanese war came their number increased. There was an abnormal demand for wheat for the Russian flour mills established in Harbin. These Chinese farmers ended up by festooning the valleys of the Nonni and the Sungari, all the way from the Great Khingan Range to the northern spurs of the Chengpai mountains to the

east.

HARBIN AN INDUSTRIAL CENTER

The net production of all this Chinese farming activity was naturally tremendous. Only 15 per cent. of their

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production was quite enough to cover local demands. For years more than 85 per cent. of their products had to be shipped out of the country.

Harbin is the center to which all this agricultural life and many industrial activities based on agricultural products, principally wheat and beans, gravitate.

There are twenty-four flour mills standing now in Harbin. They are no mere water-wheel decoration of an old Chinese landscape. Many of them are huge modern brick structures, with modern occidental equipments which make one's fancies travel back to Minneapolis. Most of them were built by the Russians. But many of the Russian mills have passed into Chinese hands since the "Reds" came to power. Two large new Chinese flour mills were opened a few years before my visit there. One of them stands on the northern bank of the Sungari and is capitalized at $2,000,000; the other one, with a capitalization of $1,200,000, is in the Tungszechiatze section. The daily capacity of the first, I was told, was about 360,000 pounds; and of the second, 304,000 pounds. All of which gives an idea as to the magnitude of these establishments. These twenty-four mills account for 77 per cent. of all the flour mills along the line of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

Bean-oil production is a great industry at all the leading centers of Manchuria. Out of more than 50 oilmills in Harbin, only three belonged to Japanese: all the rest were under Chinese control. Leather business is another line of industry which the Chinese are conducting on a large scale there. For years it has not done very well. The factory organized by General Chu, exmilitary Governor of the Amur Province, with the capital of $200,000 back in 1915, was not much of a success because of the lack of adequate capital. A new leather factory with a capital of $3,000,000 was organized by a well-known Chinese capitalist in Harbin, Mr. Chang

Fengting. Half of the total capitalization was spent for the purchase of machinery for the factory, it was said.

RUSSIAN WORK IN PORT ARTHUR AND DALNY

South in Port Arthur Russians found an entirely different condition of things. Unlike Harbin, Port Arthur was an old fortified town of something like 10,000 people, with traditions and vested interests, when Russia took it over. The fortifications were quite out of date and about as effective against modern weapons of attack as stage scenery. Just how many millions of good Russian rubles went into the reconstruction of the fortifications is not known. It was no military secret, however, that Russians spent more than 12,000,000 rubles in building a European town there. By January, 1903, the old Chinese town and the new Russian section had the total of more than 42,000 people. Of course it was essentially a garrison town, and an overwhelming majority of the Russian population there belonged to the official class. Some 13,580 of them were either army or navy men. The Russian civilians numbered slightly over

4,000.

The building of the port of Dalny, as the Russians called the present Dairen, was much like the creation of Harbin. Russians went to work there in 1899 and found a disreputable fragment of a Chinese fishing hamlet along the rim of the Talien Bay. The budget for the first stage of the construction of the harbor called for 10,800,000 rubles, and in, addition 2,000,000 for the building of the port city. The actual amount of Russian money thrown into the enterprise was more than 30,000,000 rubles. The Russo-Japanese war broke upon it like a withering storm just when the first stage of building was done and the second stage about to begin.