Monument of Wanyan Aguda in Acheng District

Human settlement in the Harbin area dates from at least 2200 BC during the late Stone Age. Wanyan Aguda, the founder and first emperor (reigned 1115–1123) of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), was born in the Jurchen Wanyan tribes who resided near the Ashi River in this region.[1] In AD 1115 Aguda established Jin's capital Shangjing (Upper Capital) Huining Prefecture in today's Acheng District of Harbin.[2] After Aguda's death, the new emperor Wanyan Sheng ordered the construction of a new city on a uniform plan. The planning and construction emulated major Chinese cities, in particular Bianjing (Kaifeng), although the Jin capital was smaller than its Northern Song prototype.[3] Huining Prefecture served as the first superior capital of the Jin empire until Wanyan Liang (the fourth emperor of Jin Dynasty) moved the capital to Yanjing (now Beijing) in 1153.[4] Liang even went so far as to destroy all palaces in his former capital in 1157.[4] Wanyan Liang's successor Wanyan Yong (Emperor Shizong) restored the city and established it as a secondary capital in 1173.[5] Ruins of the Shangjing Huining Prefecture were discovered and excavated about 2 km (1.2 mi) from present-day Acheng's central urban area.[2][6] The site of the old Jin capital ruins is a national historic reserve, and includes the Jin Dynasty History Museum [zh]. The museum, open to the public, was renovated in late 2005.[6] Mounted statues of Aguda and of his chief commander Wanyan Zonghan (also Nianhan) stand in the grounds of the museum.[7] Many of the artifacts found there are on display in nearby Harbin.

After the Mongol conquest of the Jin Empire (1211–1234), Huining Prefecture was abandoned. In the 17th century, the Manchus used building materials from Huining Prefecture to construct their new stronghold in Alchuka. The region of Harbin remained largely rural until the 19th century, with over ten villages and about 30,000 people in the city's present-day urban districts by the end of the 19th century.[8]

A small village in 1898 grew into the modern city of Harbin.[9][10] Polish engineer Adam Szydłowski drew plans for the city following the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which the Russian Empire had financed.[11] The Russians selected Harbin as the base of their administration over this railway and the Chinese Eastern Railway Zone. The railways were largely constructed by Russian engineers and indentured workers. The Chinese Eastern Railway extended the Trans-Siberian Railway: substantially reducing the distance from Chita to Vladivostok and also linking the new port city of Dalny (Dalian) and the Russian naval base of Port Arthur (Lüshun). The settlement founded by the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway quickly turned into a "boomtown", growing into a city within five years. The majority of settlers in Harbin came from southern Ukraine (Russian Empire). In addition to Ukrainians, there were many Russians, Poles, Georgians, and Tatars.[12]

The city was intended as a showcase for Russian imperialism in Asia and the American scholar Simon Karlinsky, who was born in Harbin in 1924 into a Russian family, wrote that in Harbin "the buildings, boulevards, and parks were planned—well before the October Revolution—by distinguished Russian architects and also by Swiss and Italian town planners", giving the city a very European appearance.[12] Starting in the late 19th century, a mass influx of Han Chinese arrived in Manchuria, and taking advantage of the rich soils, founded farms that soon turned Manchuria into the "breadbasket of China" while others went to work in the mines and factories of Manchuria, which become one of the first regions of China to industrialize. Harbin became one of the main points through which food and industrial products were shipped out of Manchuria. A sign of Harbin's wealth was that a theater had established during its first decade and in 1907 the play K zvezdam by Leonid Andreyev had its premiere there.[13]

 

St. Nicolas Orthodox, a Russian Orthodox church in Harbin, circa 1940, demolished during the Cultural Revolution

During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), Russia used Harbin as its base for military operations in Manchuria. Following Russia's defeat, its influence declined. Several thousand nationals from 33 countries, including the United States, Germany, and France, moved to Harbin. Sixteen countries established consulates to serve their nationals, who established several hundred industrial, commercial and banking companies. Churches were rebuilt for Russian Orthodox, Lutheran/German Protestant, and Polish Catholic Christians. Chinese capitalists also established businesses, especially in brewing, food, and textiles. Harbin became the economic hub of northeastern China and an international metropolis.[8]

The rapid growth of the city challenged the public healthcare system. The worst-ever recorded outbreak of pneumonic plague was spread to Harbin through the Trans-Manchurian railway from the border trade port of Manzhouli.[14] The plague lasted from late autumn of 1910 to spring 1911 and killed 1,500 Harbin residents (mostly ethnic Chinese), or about five percent of its population at the time.[15] This turned out to be the beginning of the large so-called Manchurian plague pandemic, which ultimately claimed 60,000 victims. In the winter of 1910, Dr. Wu Lien-teh (later the founder of Harbin Medical University) was given instructions from the Foreign Office, Peking, to travel to Harbin to investigate the plague. Dr. Wu asked for imperial sanction to cremate plague victims, as cremation of these infected victims turned out to be the turning point of the epidemic. The suppression of this plague pandemic changed medical progress in China. Bronze statues of Dr. Wu Lien-teh are built in Harbin Medical University to remember his contributions in promoting public health, preventive medicine, and medical education.[16]

The first generation of Harbin Russians were mostly the builders and employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway. They moved to Harbin in order to work on the railroad. At the time Harbin was not an established city. The city was almost built from scratch by the builders and early settlers. Houses were constructed, furniture and personal items were brought in from Russia. After the Manchurian plague epidemic, Harbin's population continued to increase sharply, especially inside the Chinese Eastern Railway Zone. In 1913 the Chinese Eastern Railway census showed its ethnic composition as: Russians – 34,313, Chinese (that is, including Hans, Manchus etc.) – 23,537, Jews – 5,032, Poles – 2556, Japanese – 696, Germans – 564, Tatars – 234, Latvians – 218, Georgians – 183, Estonians – 172, Lithuanians – 142, Armenians – 124; there were also Karaims, Ukrainians, Bashkirs, and some Western Europeans. In total, 68,549 citizens of 53 nationalities, speaking 45 languages.[17] Research shows that only 11.5 percent of all residents were born in Harbin.[18] By 1917, Harbin's population exceeded 100,000, with over 40,000 of them being ethnic Russians.[19]

 

Harbin's Kitayskaya Street (Russian for "Chinese Street"), now Zhongyang Street (Chinese for "Central Street"), before 1945

After Russia's Great October Socialist Revolution in November 1917, more than 100,000 defeated Russian White Guards and refugees retreated to Harbin, which became a major center of White Russian émigrés and the largest Russian enclave outside the Soviet Union.[19] Karlinsky noted that a major difference with the Russian émigrés who arrived in Harbin was: "Unlike the Russian émigrés who went to Paris or Prague or even to Shanghai, the new residents of Harbin were not a minority surrounded by a foreign population. They found themselves instead in an almost totally Russian city, populated mainly by people with roots in the south of European Russia."[12] The city had a Russian school system, as well as publishers of Russian-language newspapers and journals. The Russian Harbintsy[a] community numbered around 120,000 at its peak in the early 1920s.[20] Many of Harbin's Russians were wealthy, which sometimes confused foreign visitors who expected them to be poor, with for instance the American writer Harry A. Franck in his 1923 book Wanderings in North China writing the Russian "ladies as well gowned as at the Paris races [who] strolled with men faultlessly garbed by European standards", leading him to wonder how they had achieved this "deceptive appearance".[21]

The Harbin Institute of Technology was established in 1920 as the Harbin Sino-Russian School for Industry to educate railway engineers via a Russian method of instruction. Students could select from two majors at the time: Railway Construction or Electric Mechanic Engineering. On 2 April 1922, the school was renamed the Sino-Russian Industrial University. The original two majors eventually developed into two major departments: the Railway Construction Department and the Electric Engineering Department. Between 1925 and 1928 the university's Rector was Leonid Ustrugov, the Russian Deputy Minister of Railways under Nicholas II before the Russian Revolution, Minister of Railways under Admiral Kolchak's government and a key figure in the development of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The Russian community in Harbin made it their mission to preserve the pre-revolutionary culture of Russia. The city had numerous Russian language newspapers, journals, libraries, theaters, and two opera companies.[22] One of the famous Russian poets in Harbin was Valery Pereleshin, who started publishing his intensely homoerotic poetry in 1937 and was also one of the few Russian writers in Harbin who learned Mandarin.[23] The subject of Pereleshin's poetry caused problems with the Russian Fascist Party, and led Pereleshin to leave Harbin for Shanghai, and ultimately to the United States.[23] Not all of the Russian newspapers were of high quality, with Karlinsky calling Nash put', the newspaper of the Russian Fascist Party "the lowest example of gutter journalism that Harbin had ever seen".[24] Nikolai Baikov, a Russian writer in Harbin was known for his novels of exile life in that city together with his accounts of his travels across Manchuria and the folklore of its Manchu and Chinese population.[24] Boris Yulsky, a young Russian writer who published his short stories in the newspaper Rubezh was considered to be a promising writer whose career was cut short when he gave up literature for activism in the Russian Fascist Party and cocaine addiction.[24] Moya-tvoya (mine – yours), a pidgin language that was a combination of Russian and Mandarin Chinese that had developed in the 19th century when Chinese went to work in Siberia, was considered essential by the Chinese businesspeople of Harbin.[25]

In the early 1920s, according to Chinese scholars' recent studies, over 20,000 Jews lived in Harbin.[26] After 1919, Dr. Abraham Kaufman played a leading role in Harbin's large Russian Jewish community.[27] The Republic of China discontinued diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1920, leaving many Russians stateless.[further explanation needed] When the Chinese Eastern Railway and government in Beijing announced in 1924 that they agreed the railroad would employ only Russian or Chinese nationals, the emigrés were forced to announce their ethnic and political allegiance. Most accepted Soviet citizenship.[citation needed]

The Chinese warlord Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" seized the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929. The Soviet military force quickly put an end to the crisis and forced the Nationalist Chinese to accept the restoration of joint Soviet-Chinese administration of the railway.[28]

 

Headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army's covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit (Unit 731)

Japan invaded Manchuria outright after the Mukden Incident in September 1931. After the Japanese captured Qiqihar in the Jiangqiao Campaign, the Japanese 4th Mixed Brigade moved toward Harbin, closing in from the west and south. Bombing and strafing by Japanese aircraft forced the Chinese army to retreat from Harbin. Within a few hours, the Japanese occupation of Harbin was complete.[29]

With the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, the so-called "pacification of Manchukuo" began, as volunteer armies continued to fight the Japanese. Harbin became a major operations base for the infamous medical experimenters of Unit 731, who killed people of all ages and ethnicities. All these units were known collectively as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.[30] The main facility of the Unit 731 was built in 1935 at Pingfang District, approximately 24 km (15 mi) south of Harbin urban area at that time.[31] Between 3,000 and 12,000 citizens including men, women, and children[32][33]—from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai[34]—died during the human experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone, which does not include victims from other medical experimentation sites.[35] Almost 70 percent of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese, including both civilian and military.[36] Close to 30 percent of the victims were Russian.[37] The Russian Fascist Party had the task of capturing "unreliable" Russians living in Harbin to hand over to Unit 731 to serve as the unwilling subjects of the gruesome experiments.[38] Some others were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders from then-colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of the prisoners of war from the Allies of World War II[39] (although many more Allied POWs were victims of Unit 731 at other sites). Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia, after being infected with various diseases.[40] Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644 and Unit 100 among others) were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Human targets were also used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions. Flame throwers were tested on humans. Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosive bombs.[41][42] Twelve Unit 731 members were found guilty in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials but later repatriated; others received secret immunity by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur before the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in exchange for biological warfare work in the Cold War for the American Force.[43]

 

Three different nationalities – Chinese, Japanese and Russian – on Kitaiskaia Street

Chinese revolutionaries including Zhao Shangzhi, Yang Jingyu, Li Zhaolin, Zhao Yiman continued to struggle against the Japanese in Harbin and its administrative area, commanding the main anti-Japanese guerrilla army-Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army—which was originally organized by the Manchurian branch of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The army was supported by the Comintern after the CCP Manchurian Provincial Committee was dissolved in 1936.

 

Anti–communist Russian Fascist Party Blackshirts, inspired by Italian Fascism, at Harbin Railway Station, 1934, waiting for arrival of their leader Konstantin Rodzaevsky

Under the Manchukuo régime and Japanese occupation, Harbin Russians had a difficult time. In 1935, the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway (KVZhD) to the Japanese, and many Russian emigres left Harbin (48,133 of them were arrested during the Soviet Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 as "Japanese spies"[44]).[19] Most departing Russians returned to the Soviet Union, but a substantial number moved south to Shanghai or emigrated to the United States and Australia. By the end of the 1930s, the Russian population of Harbin had dropped to around 30,000.[45]

Many of Harbin's Jews (13,000 in 1929) fled after the Japanese occupation as the Japanese associated closely with militant anti-Soviet Russian Fascists, whose ideology of anti-Bolshevism and nationalism was laced with virulent anti-Semitism.[46] The Kwantung Army-sponsored and financed the Russian Fascist Party, which after 1932 started to play an over-sized role in the Harbin's Russian community as its thugs began to harass and sometimes kill those opposed to it. Most Jews left for Shanghai, Tianjin, and the British Mandate of Palestine.[47] In the late 1930s, some German Jews fleeing the Nazis moved to Harbin. Japanese officials later facilitated Jewish emigration to several cities in western Japan, notably Kobe, which came to have Japan's largest synagogue.

 

Monument to Soviet soldiers in Harbin's Nangang District, built by Soviet Red Army in 1945

The Soviet Army took the city on 20 August 1945[48] and Harbin never came under the control of the Nationalist Government, whose troops stopped 60 km (37 mi) short of the city.[49] The city's administration was transferred by the departing Soviet Army to the Chinese People's Liberation Army in April 1946. On 28 April 1946, the communist government of Harbin was established, making the 700,000-citizen-city the first large city governed by the communists.[8] During the short occupation of Harbin by the Soviet Army (August 1945 to April 1946), thousands of Russian emigres who had been identified as members of the Russian Fascist Party and fled communism after the Russian October Revolution,[20] were forcibly deported to the Soviet Union. After 1952 the Soviet Union launched a second wave of immigration back to Russia.[20] By 1964, the Russian population in Harbin had been reduced to 450.[45] The rest of the European community (Russians, Germans, Poles, Greeks, etc.) emigrated from 1950 to 1954 to Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, and the US, or were repatriated to their home countries.[20] By 1988 the original Russian community numbered just thirty, all of them elderly. Modern Russians living in Harbin mostly moved there in the 1990s and 2000s, and have no relation to the first wave of emigration.[citation needed]

Harbin was one of the key construction cities of China during the First Five-Year Plan period from 1951 to 1956. 13 of the 156 key construction projects were aid-constructed by the Soviet Union in Harbin. This project made Harbin an important industrial base of China. During the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961, Harbin experienced a very tortuous development course as several Sino-Soviet contracts were cancelled by the Soviet Union.[50] During the Cultural Revolution many foreign and Christian things were uprooted. On 23 August 1966, Red Guards stormed into St. Nicholas Cathedral, burned its icons on the streets while chanting xenophobic slogans before destroying the church.[51] As the normal economic and social order was seriously disrupted, Harbin's economy also suffered from serious setbacks. One of the main reasons of this setback is with its Soviet ties deteriorating and the Vietnam War escalating, China became concerned of a possible nuclear attack. Mao Zedong ordered an evacuation of military and other key state enterprises away from the northeastern frontier, with Harbin being the core zone of this region, bordering the Soviet Union. During this Third Front Development Era of China, several major factories of Harbin were relocated to Southwestern Provinces including Gansu, Sichuan, Hunan and Guizhou, where they would be strategically secure in the event of a possible war. Some major universities of China were also moved out of Harbin, including Harbin Military Academy of Engineering (predecessor of Changsha's National University of Defense Technology) and Harbin Institute of Technology (Moved to Chongqing in 1969 and relocated to Harbin in 1973).[52]

 

Huang Shan Jewish Cemetery of Harbin

National economy and social service have obtained significant achievements since the Chinese economic reform first introduced in 1979. Harbin holds the China Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair each year since 1990.[8] Harbin once housed one of the largest Jewish communities in the Far East before World War II. It reached its peak in the mid-1920s when 25,000 European Jews lived in the city. Among them were the parents of Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel. In 2004, Olmert came to Harbin with an Israeli trade delegation to visit the grave of his grandfather in Huang Shan Jewish Cemetery,[53] which had over 500 Jewish graves identified.[20]

On 5 October 1984, Harbin was designated a sub-provincial city by the Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee. The eight counties of Harbin originally formed part of Songhuajiang Prefecture whose seat was practically located inside the urban area of Harbin since 1972. The prefecture was officially merged into Harbin city on 11 August 1996, increasing Harbin's total population to 9.47 million.[54]

Harbin hosted the third Asian Winter Games in 1996.[55] In 2009, Harbin held the XXIV Winter Universiade.

A memorial hall honoring Korean nationalist and independence activist[56] Ahn Jung-geun was unveiled at Harbin Railway Station on 19 January 2014.[57] Ahn assassinated four-time Prime Minister of Japan and former Resident-General of Korea Itō Hirobumi at No.1 platform of Harbin Railway Station on 26 October 1909, as Korea on the verge of annexation by Japan after the signing of the Eulsa Treaty.[58] South Korean President Park Geun-Hye raised an idea of erecting a monument for Ahn while meeting with Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping during a visit to China in June 2013.[59] After that China began to build a memorial hall honoring Ahn at Harbin Railway Station. As the hall was unveiled on 19 January 2014, the Japanese side soon lodged protest with China over the construction of Ahn's memorial hall.[60]

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