HARBIN - 哈尔滨 - Харбин
Jewish Synagogue in Harbin, early 1900s
The city once had the largest
Jewish community in the Far East, some 25,000 in the 1920s. The main syngogue, above, was built in 1907-9. In the late 19th century many Jews fled Czarist Russia and other countries
to escape the pogroms and oppression. From a report in The St. Petersburg Times, 2001:
"It was a free zone," said Svetlana Rusnak, senior researcher at Vladivostok's V.K. Arseniev Primorye Local Studies Museum. "What was impossible in the Russian empire was implemented in Harbin. For instance, in Russia, Jews didn't have the right to own land and had limitations on entering universities and couldn't freely do business in the capital. But in Harbin, there was nothing like that. ... It was a mosaic, a multiethnic society, united by Russian culture."
ARBIN has surely one of the most extraordinary and varied histories of any city. It owes its existence principally to the Russian workers of the China Eastern Railway (see below), who built up the town at the turn of the 20th century.
The second wave of Russians came in the 1920s when the city was flooded with some 100,000 White Russian refugees fleeing the Revolution, making it the largest Russian enclave outside Russia.
Note: The author did not visit Harbin and virtually none of the information on this page is covered in his book.
Harry Franck in his book Wandering in Northern China writes:
At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself back in Europe. He might easily believe he had crossed the line into Russia and brought up into one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture, customs, inhabitants, are all on the Russian model.
In 1931 Japan seized Manchuria and set up a puppet government. In the mid-1930s many Russians fled Harbin for the Soviet Union (where most were arrested, of course, for espionage or counterrevolutionary activity; some 30,000 were shot) or for China, to cities including Shanghai, Tientsin, Peking and Tsingtao.
G.H. Thomas, writing in November 1936 says of the foreign community in Tsingtao:
There are quite a few Germans and Norwegians, and altogether about three hundred foreigners, not counting the Russians. These are White Russians, refugees from the Revolution, and have a strange standing in China. They are people without a country, and their lot is a sad one.
IN 1945, when the Soviets occupied Manchuria, many of the remaining Russians were sent to labor camps. Manchuria was not completely in Chinese hands until 1952. By the mid-1960s, there were virtually no Harbin Russians left.
Although much neglected after the war, St. Sophia has now been restored and is an important historical museum.
Harbin Police Station in early 1930s.
ThisThis exquisite Russian Orthodox church, St. Nikolai, in the middle of Central Square, was built of wood without nails. It was destroyed by Red Guards in August 1966 during the Cultural Revolution. In 2001 a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times interviewed a Harbin Russian who remembered the terrible event:
All the Russians gathered to watch. Everyone was crying. Grandmothers and grandfathers were weeping in the streets, but what could you do? And when the Russians were standing there, the Chinese mocked us, saying, 'Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they are destroying it?'
Last yearLast year an arrangement was made between China and Russia to replace it with a similar church.
A postcard from 1920s or 30s shows the cosmopolitan atmosphere of old Harbin,
which was christened Eastern Paris or Eastern Moscow or St. Petersburg. At one time it was the only city
in the
Far East with a larger foreign than native population and contained almost
as many foreign consulates as Shanghai.
A Harbin Russian, interviewed
in the St. Petersburg Times in 2001, recalled how it was in the old days:
Central Street resembled Moscow's Arbat, and there were Russian banks, shops, restaurants and hotels. Twenty-two churches graced the skyline - including the onion-domed St. Nikolai Cathedral, an architectural gem built of wood without nails in the old Russian style. "It was like a little Moscow or Paris here, We had an opera here. There were so many magazines and newspapers and the cultural life was on a very high level. Unfortunately, all that was destroyed."
"It was like a little Moscow or Paris here," he said in his native Russian. "We had an opera here. There were so many magazines and newspapers here, and the cultural life was on a very high level. Unfortunately, all that was destroyed."
This beauty, above in the 1930s, was called Church of the Holy Iberian Icon. It is reportedly in a bad state today.
This This extraordinary church of the Annuciation, one of the largest in Harbin,
did not survive the Cultural Revolution.
It was blown to bits in 1970.
Many of Harbin's colonial-era buildings survive today.
Baboushka, could this be China? Old Harbin, showing St. Nikolai Church on Central Square.
Jile Si (also known as Elysium or Temple of Bliss), a Buddhist temple near Harbin,
was built in 1921 The Chinese, concerned that St. Sophia had affected the feng shui of the city,
built this impressive sacred complex to correct the situation. The Ch
Japanese Consulate in Harbin in 1930.
I just had dinner with Kim and Steve. They both seem well. I think they have to worry about Daniel thouiith tm e
OLD HARBIN TRAIN STATION
The Chinese Eastern Railway was a single-track line extending the Trans-Siberian Railway from near the Siberian city of Chita via Harbin across northern Manchuria to the Russian port of Vladivostok. This route reduced the travel distance required along the original main northern route to Vladivostok (this original route lay completely outside China). During 1917-1924 (Russian Civil War) the Russian part of the CER came under the administration of the White Army. After 1924, the USSR and China administered the Northern CER jointly, while Japan maintained control of the southern spurline to Lushun and Dairen, formerly Port Arthur and Dalny. In 1935, the USSR sold its rights in the CER to the Japan-controlled Manchukuo government.
Another view of Central Square, dominated by St. Nikolai Church, in the 1930s.
Where the church was now lies a monument, at center of traffic cirle.
A fairly recent view of the old Moscow Department Store, built in 1906. It became a provincial
museum in 1922. It faced St. Nikolai Church (see above) and is visible in
contemporary photo below, at center left.
Another department store in Harbin in the 1930s.
HARBIN TODAY
Harbin today is a thriving industrial city with a greater population of about 10 million, about twice the size of metropolitan Houston. It is famous for its winter Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. Although the original Russian residents have long since gone, the streets are filled with tourists from the old country, now a major trading partner, anxious to see and experience the many remnants of Russian culture. Aside from the churches and other buildings, its bread and sausages, for instance, and many words in its dialect reveal the city's Russian roots. In center of traffic circle, right, stands a monument where once St. Nikolai stood, facing the old Moscow Department Store, which still stands, near right, with red roof.
Present-day map of Harbin
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Unit 731 - War Crimes
This covert center, in a district south of Harbin, was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes of the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Some 10,000 people of Chinese, Russian and other nationalities were subjected to the most inhumane medical and military experimentation. It actively conducted germ warfare against the Chinese people, resulting in thousands of deaths. See more information.
Also History Channel has a DVD on the subject.
The Human Condition
又名: 人间的条件 / 做人的条件 / 人的条件
导演: 小林正树 (Masaki Kobayashi (I))
This late-50s antiwar film, in three parts, depicts the inglorious end of the Japanese colony that was Manchukuo from the perspective of a sympathetic and humane central character. Of the 1.5 million left there at the end of the war, 600,000 were military prisoners. The DVDs unfortunately are expensive.
"An American in China, 1936-1939"
