Dozens of dynasties, hundreds of emperors, thousands of years of civilization... yes, China has a long, rich past.  And practically none of it has to do with Harbin.  This city’s history is very short: the 1958 monument shown here is nearly half Harbin’s age.  The city’s history is also very volatile: the flags of tsarist Russia, Manchurian warlords, Japan, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China have all flown here, giving Harbin a richness all its own.  This view from atop the Gloria Inn looks northwest toward the Flood Control Monument.  The frozen and snow-covered Songhua River lies in the background, with Sun Island - site of the Ice and Snow World and the Snow Sculpture Art Fair - in the distance.

Just 110 years ago, this was desolate territory in the northern reaches of Manchuria (present-day northeastern China), the ancestral homeland of China’s reigning Qing dynasty rulers.  The dynasty had grown weak by this time, which led to a decades-long power struggle between China, Russia, and Japan for control of Manchuria.  China ceded the territory to the Japanese after losing a war against them in 1895, but Russia persuaded Japan to give it back to China soon after.  As payment, China let a Russian-controlled railroad - the China Eastern Railroad - be built across Manchuria.  Russia chose this riverside location as the headquarters of that project and began construction of a railroad bridge across the Songhua River - and thus Harbin was born, in 1898.  In this view northeast from the Gloria Inn, that Russian railroad bridge can be seen in the distance.

Two years later, in 1900, China’s anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion broke out and spread to Manchuria, and the Russian military moved in to quell the uprising.  Once things calmed down, Russia decided it wanted to keep Manchuria for itself, but reluctantly agreed to pull out its troops in 1902 to keep peace with Japan.  Work on the railroad continued; Harbin was like a frontier town in the American West at this time.  Men far outnumbered women, Japanese-run brothels were quite popular, and the nightlife was raucous.  On the other hand, the city had churches, an active arts community, a library, a Russian-language newspaper - even beauty pageants and horse racing, as shown in these old photographs on display in Harbin’s Saint Sophia church.  Harbin’s 15,000 Russians represented every strata of Russian society.  Harbin’s 30,000 Chinese, who took advantage of the business opportunities created by the railroad, remained segregated from the Russians, particularly after the Boxer Rebellion.

Despite their promises, the Russian troops stayed in Manchuria, which upset the Japanese and led to a war between them in 1904.  Harbin, far from the fighting, became a wartime boom town with plenty of business opportunities; its population soared to a quarter-million.  Russia lost the war and finally withdrew its troops, though Harbin and the railroad remained in Russian hands.  Russian influence fell further when China proclaimed Harbin an “open city” in 1907.  Harbin then became international and cosmopolitan, “the Paris of the Far East,” hosting many foreign companies and services.  Western countries, including the United States, even opened consulates.  This model of Saint Sophia appears within the real Saint Sophia in Harbin; constructed the same year Harbin became an open city, it is now a museum displaying photographs from the city’s early days.

China’s Qing dynasty fell in 1911 and tsarist Russia fell in 1917; meanwhile, Japan’s power and ambition grew.  This all led to a very complicated political situation in Manchuria and Harbin: the Chinese central government, the Chinese regional government in Manchuria, Manchurian warlords, White Russians, Red Russians, and Japanese all competed for power in the region, and control of the railroad passed to a number of these players a number of times.  Harbin’s population swelled with rich White Russian refugees streaming to this relic of prerevolutionary Russia to continue their previous lives.  They spent summers sunning and boating on the Songhua River, and winters skating and sledding; it was like the revolution never happened.  But the economy soured; Russian businesses failed and were taken over by Chinese entrepreneurs, and many previously rich Russians entered poverty - leading Harbin to be called “the graveyard of the white man’s prestige.”  A view inside Saint Sophia.

The struggle for control of Harbin ended in 1932 when the Japanese military rolled in and took control of the city along with the rest of the region.  Manchuria became Manchukuo, a puppet state of Japan, and the last emperor of China’s Qing dynasty, Pu Yi, was installed as its emperor.  The railroad was sold to the Japanese, and many Russians left Harbin as a result of the sale and tightening Japanese control.  After 25 years, the cosmopolitan days of Harbin were over.  Conditions were pretty miserable during the occupation; poverty, crime, hunger, cold, and floods were constant problems; and the Japanese conducted biological warfare experiments on live humans at a nearby laboratory, killing thousands.  The occupation ended with the Japanese surrender of Manchuria in 1945 at the end of World War II.  In the wake of their withdrawal, Harbin’s economy came to a halt, with practically no production or commerce.  Shown here is the ceiling and rotunda of Saint Sophia.

With the Japanese gone, power struggles around Harbin began anew.  The Guomindang, rulers of much of China before Japan’s occupation, wanted control over Manchuria, but the Soviets got there first.  This allowed their fellow Chinese communists to move a massive number of their own troops into the region.  When the Soviets were forced to withdraw under Western pressure in 1946, those Chinese communists quickly took over Manchuria, sparking a civil war between the communists and the Guomindang.  Harbin was vital to the communist effort: not only did it serve as its headquarters in Manchuria during the civil war, producing military supplies for its troops, but as the first major city under communist control, it also served as a training ground for practicing communist economics and leadership in cities.  The communist army grew in strength and numbers there, until in 1948 it won massive victories in Manchuria against the Guomindang forces.  Those key victories in Manchuria led to the communist victory over China in 1949, and the People’s Republic of China was born.  A half-century after its creation, Harbin had finally and firmly become a city of China.

Harbin’s history merges with China’s at this point.  The population reached 800,000 by the founding of the People’s Republic, and that doubled over the next decade as the city became one of China’s centers of heavy industry.  The thousands in Harbin’s Russian community, who had stayed for so long and lived through so much, left.  The Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s saw the destruction of many of Harbin’s historical sites; for example, the church shown in the previous photograph was destroyed.  Still, the city retained much of its earlier charm; the wide streets and parks around the provincial museum shown here remained.  What finally removed much of that charm was China’s economic progress these past two decades; the parks here are gone, the streets are narrower, and the museum is nearly lost in a crowd of tall nondescript buildings.  Left from the past are the Russian buildings in the Daoliqu distict, a handful of Russian churches, and these old photographs of city life on display at Saint Sophia.  Today, Harbin is a massive industrial urban sprawl of more than nine million people, and like much of former Manchuria - China’s “rust belt” - its economy remains weighted down by state-owned enterprises.

A café in the Russian district of Harbin today.  Few English-language books are devoted to Harbin’s history, and those that do exist tend to be scholarly studies covering specific periods; a great layperson’s history of the city has yet to be written.  In the meantime, “The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin” (Clausen and Thøgersen, 1995, M.E. Sharpe) - which proved quite helpful in writing this page - remains the best read, though at $40 for the paperback version, it’s rather expensive.  The photography collection at Saint Sophia has been compiled into a 240-page coffee table book available only within Saint Sophia itself; the captions are in Chinese, but at $15, it’s an extremely reasonable purchase for visitors.