China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

We approached China, not by a steamer landing at Shanghai or Tientsin or Canton, as most travelers do, but in the more modern, interesting way, through Japan and its great new continental dependency, Korea (Chosen). The Eastern Three Provinces, as the Chinese call what we know as Manchuria, are situated much like our northeastern states, with Siberia and Mongolia taking the place of Canada. Yet the moment we crossed the big railway bridge over the Yalu River, we realized that we were in China, even though we were not yet in China proper. At the very edge of the river we began to see women with bound feet, coolies in blouses and blue cotton trousers drawing rickshaws and pushing wheelbarrows, and in front of the stores and hotels long upright wooden signs with strange characters on them.

In a way, however, Manchuria is partly Japanese and partly Russian. After the war of 1904–5 between Japan and Russia the southern part of the great railroad which the Russians had built there was turned over to Japan. So the American-style trains that run through Korea not only go on to Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, but there is a Japanese railway, also with the kind of trains we have at home, 500 miles long from Dairen and Port Arthur to Changchun, and many miles of Russian railway north of that. The Japanese govern the land along their railway and certain parts of all the large cities on its route. The rest of Manchuria is ruled by a Chinese who is really independent of Peking and the rest of China.