Page:The Chinese Empire. A General & Missionary Survey.djvu/381

 Mongolian lands north of Kaiyüan. Another step was gained in 1861 by the opening of the port of Newchwang to foreign trade.

In the sixties the weakness of the central government gave an opportunity to large bands of robbers to terrorise the country. They were strong enough to capture a yamen and put the Mandarin to death, and when they threatened the walled city of Kaichow the foreign community of Newchwang had to take measures for their own defence. In 1875 order was at last restored, and the Corean marches, which had become the haunt of the brigands, were thrown open to legitimate settlement, being divided into four (now six) magistracies. In 1876 the adjoining part of the Hunting Forest was also created into a Mandarin district (Hailung Cheng), and in 1897 and 1903 three new districts were created out of the remainder of the same forest. Finally, in 1903, a large tract of Mongol land west of Petuna was opened to Chinese settlement and placed under the administration of Moukden.

The foreign relations of Manchuria within recent years belong to the history of the Empire and need be only mentioned. First came the war with Japan in 1894-95, by which the hollowness of the Chinese military preparations was exposed and the seed sown of future trouble. In January 1896 a Russian colonel with sixteen men arrived in Moukden by way of northern Corea; the same year saw the conclusion of the agreement for the railway to cross Manchuria to Vladivostok, the construction of which was begun the following summer. In 1898 the Russians took over Port Arthur, and got permission to connect it with Harbin by rail.

The rising of 1900 found the Russians unprepared. Their railway was still in the making, and their garrisons too scattered and feeble to defend it effectively. All inland settlements had to be abandoned; even at Harbin the civil population escaped in barges down the Sungari. Soon, however, four columns had crossed the northern and eastern frontiers, and in the early autumn the southern column had