Russian Manchuria
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Forms: form: Russian Manchooria
Etymology: Mid-19th c., from Russian + Manchuria.
Senses: examples: text: On Saturday, the 4th of August, we steamed to the outer harbour of Olga Bay, after spending four days under sail on our passage from Nakhodka Harbour, a distance of about 120 miles.
This is another of the many beautiful harbours that fringe the coast of Russian Manchuria. It is formed of an outer and inner, or as it is called the “careening” harbour, within which lies the settlement.
ref: 1867 [1867 June 24], W. V. Lloyd, “Notes on the Russian Harbours on the Coast of Manchuria.”, in The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London, volume 37, London: John Murray, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 229:
text: In 1866, Her Majesty’s ship Scylla, Captain Courtenay, left Nagasaki, Japan, on the 20th of July, with orders to visit the different Russian settlements on the coast of Manchuria, and we are indebted to the Rev. W. V. Lloyd for an excellent account of the trip, given in the thirty-seventh volume of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society—an account which is further illustrated by a map of Russian Manchuria.
ref: 1868 October, “The Russians in Manchuria”, in New Monthly Magazine, volume CXLIII, number DLXXVIV, page 377:
text: SAGHALIN, or SAKHALIN, is the name improperly given to a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45° 57' and 54° 24' N. lat. and 141° 30' and 144° 50' E. long., off the coast of Russian Manchuria. Its proper name is Karaftu, or Karafuto.
ref: 1886, “SAGHALIN, or SAKHALIN”, in The Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, volume XXI, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, page 147, column 1:
text: Vladivostock, the most southern port of Russian Manchuria, is icebound for six months out of every twelve, and hence the absorbing desire of the authorities to advance so far southward as to secure a good and open harbour.
ref: 1889 January, “The Defensive Policy of China”, in Edinburgh Review or Critical Review, number CCCXLV, →OCLC, page 180:
text: THE chief object of my visit to Russian Manchuria was to settle for myself by personal investigation the vexed question of the condition of those Koreans who have found shelter under the Russian flag, a number estimated in Seoul at 20,000.[…]
When China ceded to Russia in 1860 the region which we call Russian Manchuria, she probably did so in ignorance of its vast agricultural capacities and mineral wealth.[…]
Grass, timber, water, coal, minerals, a soil as rich as the prairies of Illinois, and a climate not only favorable to agriculture but to human health, all await the settler, and the broad, unoccupied, and fertile lands which Russian Manchuria offers are clamoring for inhabitants.
ref: 1898, Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors, Yonsei University Press, published 1970, →OCLC, pages 223, 242-243:
text: MANCHURIA, man-cho͞oʹre-a (the land of the Manchus). The northeastern part of the Chinese Empire, situated east of Mongolia and the Argun River (which formerly traversed Manchurian territory), south of the Amur River (which separates it from Siberia), and west of the Usuri, which separates it from Primorsk (Maritime Province) or Russian Manchuria (a Chinese possession until 1860).
ref: 1906, “Manchuria”, in The New International Encyclopaedia, volume XII, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, page 782, column 1:
text: Originally speaking, the Heilungkiang Valley, amongst other Russian possessions in the Far East, had been within Manchurian domain until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was absorbed by Russia. For us, therefore, it is difficult to regard all Manchuria now within the territory of new Manchukuo and Russian Manchuria of today separately.
Now that the Manchukuo State has become absolutely independent and placed under Japanese protection, so to speak, the destiny of Russian possessions in the Far East may be easily imagined.
ref: 1933, The Japan Magazine, volume 23, →OCLC, page 68, column 1:
text: The geographical distribution of the tiger once spanned some six thousand miles of Asia from Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey and the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk in Russian Manchuria.[…]
The Manchurian tiger exists in small numbers in the Kirin Hills of eastern Manchuria. Although tigers were once common in neighboring Russian Manchuria from the vicinity of Lake Baikal and the Yablonovy Mountains to the Sea of Japan and the Island of Sakhalin in the Sea of Okhotsk, only an estimated 80 to 90 animals still survive in several isolated areas (Abramov, 1962; Anon., 1965a), primarily along some of the eastern tributaries of the Ussuri River and in the Sikhote-Alin chain of hills (Novikov, 1962).
ref: 1967, George B. Schaller, “The Tiger”, in The Deer and the Tiger: A Study of Wildlife in India, University of Chicago Press, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 224–225:
text: In November that year, President Ford flew to Vladivostok in Russian Manchuria to sign an agreement on strategic offensive arms for the period up to October 1977.
ref: 1980, Russell Warren Howe, “"Disarmament": More Poker Than Stripping”, in Weapons: The International Game of Arms, Money and Diplomacy, 1st edition, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 243:
text: Although the nearest reported threat was a strip at Sergeyeoka, an old airdrome seventy kilometers north of Vladivostok in Russian Manchuria, he was still not at ease.
ref: 1989 March, Peter Albano, chapter 1, in Quest of the Seventh Carrier (Fiction), Zebra Books, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 29:
text: During the winters of 1939 and 1940, he logged close to a thousand miles crisscrossing the Sikhote-Alin range as he tracked tigers through blizzards and paralyzing cold, sleeping rough, and feeding himself from tiger kills. His findings were alarming: along with two forest guards who helped him with tracking, estimates, and interviews with hunters across Primorye, Kaplanov concluded that no more than thirty Amur tigers remained in Russian Manchuria. In the Bikin valley, he found no tigers at all. With barely a dozen breeding females left in Russia, the subspecies now known as Panthera gris altaica was a handful of bullets and a few hard winters away from extinction.
ref: 2010, John Vaillant, “Markov”, in The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, Vintage Books, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 98–99:
text: At its extreme, this type of narrative might justify claims coextensive with the farthest expansion of the Qing/Ch'ing era (1644 through 1911, in its totality). That could in theory include what is now Mongolia and part of Russian Manchuria although to date no Chinese leaders have suggested this as a legitimate objective. Indeed, China's recent history of resolving border disputes with Russia, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam suggests that China values amicable relations with its neighbors over preserving maximalist territorial gains.
ref: 2014, James Steinberg, Michael E. O'Hanlon, “The Determinants of Chinese Strategy”, in Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: U.S.-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 36–37:
text: From the Qing era on, China had other territorial holdings on the Eurasian mainland of even more direct relevance to the subject at hand. They included what is now Mongolia and part of Russian Manchuria, and were lost to Russia over the period of roughly 1860 to 1920. No Chinese leaders have suggested so far that reclaiming these lands could be a legitimate objective of the state’s foreign policy.
ref: 2015, Michael E. O'Hanlon, “Conflicts Real, Latent, and Imaginable”, in The Future of Land Warfare, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 55:
text: The Convention of Peking, one of several unequal treaties, moreover assigned the parts in the East of the Ussuri River (Wusulijiang) to Russia. Outer Manchuria, also called Russian Manchuria was never claimed to be part of a Chinese nation-state. Today it belongs to the Russian Federation, is not longer referred to as Outer Manchuria, and is considered to be part of Siberia. Consquently, the name Manchuria refers only to Inner Manchuria today. In the following, I will refer to Inner Manchuria as Manchuria.
ref: 2017, Julia C. Schneider, “The New Setting: Political Thinking after 1912”, in Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History,, →ISBN, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 277:
text: The Far Eastern Federal District includes the Arctic region and Pacific Ocean coastline. Despite its size, its population is only 6 million and 4.5 million live in Russian Manchuria along the Chinese border. If Manchuria were once again united, it would become an^([sic]) powerhouse, linking the region’s untapped resource potential with China’s know-how, manpower, expertise, and capital. It would also provide China with fresh water, hydroelectric potential, and a major Pacific Ocean port, Vladivostok.
ref: 2023 June 22, Diane Francis, “China's Russia”, in Substack, archived from the original on 27 Jun 2023:
glosses: The part of Russia near northeastern China (including Primorsky Krai and other nearby areas) which was annexed by the Russian Empire in the mid 19th century and understood as part of Manchuria.
examples: text: On August 11, 1908, the administrative Government at Mukden had made an agreement providing for the use of American capital amounting to one hundred million dollars for a "Manchurian Bank", and the building of a railway extension from Tsitsihar to Aigun, in Russian-Manchuria, completing a line to Tsitsihar from Kinchou on the Gulf of Chihli, the construction of which she had assigned to the British contractors, Pauling and Company.
ref: [1917 March, Frederick McCormick, “Second Line of Defense”, in The Menace of Japan, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, →OCLC, page 104:
text: Then again, in 1909, she abolished the free-trade system in her Far Eastern possessions, and began to impose a heavy duty on goods entering them from Manchuria. The blow to the prosperity of Russian Manchuria and especially to that of Harbin was severe and immediate. The city, it is said, almost seemed dead at one time.
ref: 1921, “Manchuria Since 1905”, in Economic History of Manchuria, Seoul, Chosen, →OCLC, page 73:
text: In February 1904 the Japanese attacked Russian naval vessels at Port Arthur in Russian Manchuria. The cause of the war was ostensibly a disagreement over the recognition of spheres of influence in China, but the Japanese were really fighting to establish their status as a Great Power, and at least part of the Russian motive for allowing negotiations to end in war was the desire of certain members of the Russian government, in the words of Plehve, the interior minister, for ‘a short, victorious war that would stem the tide of revolution’ in Russia itself.
ref: 1975, Michael Edwardes, “The end of the Game”, in Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War, London: Hamish Hamilton, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 159:
text: Shattered and demoralized, the Russians were unable to prevent the Japanese Army from crossing into Korea and then over the northern frontier at the Yalu River into Russian Manchuria. General Kuropatkin, the Russian local field commander, found himself defending the north-south line of the Harbin to Port Arthur railway against substantial Japanese forces advancing from the Yalu to the east.
ref: 1993, H. M. Tillotson, “Mannerheim”, in Finland at Peace and War, 1918-1993, Michael Russell, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 25:
text: Simpson’s visit left him “thoughtful and a little sad. Harbin is the very center of Manchuria ... a place which will be reached for at all costs by the enemy. Who is to conquer in the climax of national anger, hatred and greed, which must come some day and tear this fair country?” He hoped the battle would be won by numbers alone: 30,000 Russians lived in Harbin alongside 250,000 Chinese. “Russian Manchuria is something of a myth made possible by a gigantic bluff,” he wrote. “It is a remnant of 1900 and China under foreign occupation. Even if there is no force used, Chinese ingenuity alone may push Russia back to the Amur [River].”
Instead it was the Japanese who did the pushing, at least from Port Arthur, at the southern tip of Manchuria, to Harbin in the far north. After the armies of eight Western nations occupied Beijing in 1901 to break a siege of foreign embassies by rebels known as the Boxers, Russia kept an enormous force—177,000 soldiers—in Manchuria long after the other armies had withdrawn. In 1903, Bertram Lenox Simpson arrived in Jilin city to see the Russian tricolor flying and Russian troops patrolling the streets and running the telegraph office. Simpson predicted that Russia’s position in Manchuria would overextend the czar’s army and drain his treasury.
ref: 2015, Michael Meyer, “To the Manchuria Station!”, in In Manchuria: A Village called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, Bloomsbury Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 115–116:
glosses: The part of Manchuria (in northeast China) controlled during some periods by Russia or the USSR.
Related terms: Dauria
Outer Manchuria
Primorsky Krai