flood from the Russian Treasury Department that coursed along the line of the Chinese Eastern Railway in those glamorous days of Imperial Russia, could have brought about this miracle of economic transformation of North Manchuria in so short a time.

From the days of its earliest youth the City of Harbin was a wonder town. It stood there on the bank of the Sungari, the greatest nature-made traffic artery of North Manchuria. It covered the point where the Sungari crossed the main line of the Chinese Eastern Railway, the greatest man-made transportation line in North Manchuria. Standing midway between Chita in transBaikalia and Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, it was the central metropolis of the vast northern plain. It was also the junction point of the South Manchuria line coming from Port Arthur and Dalny with the main line of the Chinese Eastern.

In the early days of the building of the Chinese Eastern line Russians commenced building from this central city in all three directions-to Vladivostok, to Chita, to Port Arthur. The result was that the solemn and somber waters of the Amur and of the Sungari woke one fine morning with a life such as they had never before known since the day they left the hands of the Creator. The Black Dragon River, as the natives call the Amur, turned over night into an endless flowing festival avenue decked with buntings and aquiver with lights. The buntings were the company flags of the Chinese Eastern Railway; they were on the tugboats and river steamers which puffed up and down the great stream from Habarovsk to Harbin by the hundreds, all towing rafts of lumber and thousands of barges laden with rails, sleepers, dredges, construction machinery of all sorts, clothing, provisions. All these were for the new railway lines in the making. They came from the Maritime Province of Siberia and from Japanese ports. One and all, they

were landed at Harbin and distributed in three directions from there.

Russians lorded it over the Chinese with their wonted arrogance, but they spent money like water. A Chinese who got a patch of land for a pair of old socks near the center of New Harbin became a bloated millionaire over night. Traders got the habit of thinking they were making poor business of it if they failed to make 200 per cent. net on a deal. "Russian officers," wrote a British eyewitness of the Harbin life of those days, "and the army of engineers engaged on the railway-they are all excellently paid to stimulate them to hurry the line to completion-make for Harbin when they get a few days' leave. A Russian's idea of good-fellowship, when in his cups, is to squander, to pour champagne on the floor, just to show he doesn't mind expense, to light his cigarette with a three-ruble note, and generally to splash money around.

"There is a café chantant at Harbin which has the laxity of café chantants in other parts of the world. The night before I was at Harbin an engineer arrived, his pockets bulging with rubles, and he showed his idea of money by making all the girls sit in a row while he poured champagne on hundred-ruble notes, and then he stuck these notes (£10) on the forehead of each of the eight girls. That is the Harbin idea of having a good time."

Pittsburgh steel millionaires at the Waldorf in the classic days could have matched the extravaganza of Harbin life, but otherwise one has to go to the high-colored pages of regulation Western fiction to find anything like it. No adjectives are adequate to picture the boom the Russo-Japanese war brought to Harbin. For there the great Russian Army with all its war supplies was collected.

Russians laid out the residential section of the city

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