LA PESTE EN CHINE

KHARBIN, March 8.

When the late Li Hung-chang, who was for many years the most powerful satrap in the Empire, died full of honours, Liu Kun-yi, the Viceroy of Nanking, is said to have remarked, “China's greatest enemy is dead”, and Chinese recalling those fatal secret negotiations conducted by Li Hung-chang by which Russia was conceded the right to a belt of territory across Chinese Manchuria for the purpose of constructing a military railway may well endorse the bitter saying of the Viceroy.

Here in the heart of Manchuria there has arisen as a result of this concession a Russian city, a second Irkutsk with 40.000 Russian civilians, with Russian public buildings, churches, banks, hotels, mills, and factories equal to

those of European Russia — a city guarded by Russian regiments and fed by

1) D’après le Correspondant de Pe-king du Times; Cf. Times Weekly Edition, March 24th and 31st 1911.

lines of railway patrolled by Russian soldiers. To supply this concourse of Europeans are masses of Chinese, a colony of Japanese, including 300 women of a certain class, and a number of business men of many nationalities. The “ty itself lies on the Sungari, the chief navigable branch of the Amur, which is here spanned by one of the finest bridges in Eastern Asia. Its growth has been continuous and amazing. In the Russian town proper there are not less than 20,000 Chinese; in the river plain near the railway bridge is the Chinese town of Fu Chia Tien, an unusanitary, undrained town of low, one-storeyed buildings, with a resident population of 25,000, and, when the river opens, a floating additional population of 10,000. This town with its narrow lanes, its open gutters, its overcrowding, has been stricken with plague, lurid details of which have furnished gruesome reading in Europe for some months past. Happily the plague has now subsided; for several days there have been no cases traceable to the city itself, and fear has disappeared. But there has been a period of considerable anxiety, and, in view of the approaching conference in Mukden, a brief résumé of the visitation may be recorded.