THE TRAIN DREW up in a station peopled by the ghosts of Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and patrolled by scarcely more substantial little soldiers in grey uniforms. The labels on my luggage were out of date at last. We had reached Manchuli.
The flag of a brand new kingdom, the flag of Manchukuo, flew above the station buildings. It was yellow, with a pleasant agglomeration of stripes in one corner. But the flag was the only outward sign of change. True, there was a little Japanese official who took the German consul and myself off to a remote part of the village, and there, when we had filled up forms the size of sagas, issued us with the new Manchukuo visas. (They take up a page in one’s passport. They are recognized by only two other countries – Japan and Salvador.) But even this bureaucratic interlude had its typically Chinese side. We travelled to the passport office in a tiny decrepit droshky, pulled by a mouse-like pony. Crowded though it already was, we were saddled with a supercargo in the shape of an enormous coolie. He did nothing at all except slightly retard our progress, but his presence was clearly part of a recognized routine and when it was all over he demanded a tip. He described himself as a ‘visa-porter’.
The Chinese flair for creating employment is wonderfully quick. The passport office had only been open a month.
The train on the Chinese Eastern Railway had been held up for us. Soon we were rattling eastward across illimitable light green plains, usually fringed by a formal jagged line of hills. There was not much of interest to be seen. Shaggy camels viewed our progress with phlegmatic scorn. A herdsman’s pony lost its nerve and bolted. Duck in great numbers went wheeling up from marshes into an emptiness which found reflection on the earth. The interior decoration of the carriages, the portentous whiskers of the Russian guards, combined to lend a somehow late Victorian atmosphere to the train. Surrounded by plush and mirrors, we ran slowly across the wastes of North Manchuria.
Next morning we reached Harbin. It was fourteen days since I had left London. Ten of them had been spent in the train. I was glad to stretch my legs.
Harbin has been called the Paris of the Far East, but not, I think, by anyone who has stayed there for any length of time. It is a place with a great deal of not easily definable character. In outward things, Russian influence is almost as strong as American influence is in Shanghai. But behind Harbin’s hybrid façade it is to-day the Japanese, and the Japanese only, who count; this is true everywhere in Manchuria.
The Red engineer working on the Chinese Eastern Railway: the White Russian lady in exile, grown fat on the luxuries of nostalgia, for ever fantastically scheming the downfall of the Soviets: the Chinese coolie and the Chinese merchant: the British taipan on his way to lunch at the Yacht Club – all these form a shifting curious pattern in the crowded streets. But none of them are the masters of Harbin; few of them are the masters of their own destinies there. …
Athwart that shifting pattern, nosing its way through the crowd, comes a Japanese armoured car, on its way back from a police raid. You need look no further for the masters of Harbin.
But the masters of Harbin have got their hands full. The city lives under a reign of terror, which in 1932, at the time of the shooting of Mrs. Woodruff, had reached such a pitch of intensity that on the golf links a White Russian Guard, armed to the teeth, was much more indispensable than a caddy. Few foreigners dared to walk abroad at night, and none to walk unarmed. In 1933, when I was there, conditions were improving. Bandits still throve, but the Japanese saw to it that they throve, not on foreigners with sensitive governments behind them, but on the Chinese and the White Russians. Adequate protection was now available to all sympathizers with the new regime in Manchukuo.
But even the least adventurous still find it easy to live dangerously in Harbin. A Pole, the branch manager of an important British firm, entertained me in a compound of which the wall was crowned with electrified barbed wire. There seemed to him nothing remarkable in this. A few weeks ago he had received the usual threat – a little paper figure of a man with a bullet-hole inked in red upon his forehead. This was accompanied by an exorbitant demand for dollars, and instructions as to how they should be delivered. The Pole went to the Japanese commissioner of police, and a young Samurai officer was detailed to protect him. For some time the officer slept every night at the foot of his staircase, his long sword ready to his hand. But now the danger was thought to have blown over, and the Pole observed only elementary precautions – the barbed wire, a White Russian guard at his gate, and plenty of revolvers in his car when he went out. The little paper figure of a murdered man joined lesser curios on his mantelpiece.
It was strange what an edge it gave to normal things, this faint but ever-present shadow of the bandit menace. Harbin is on the River Sungari, and in the hot summer months a brackish and fantastic Lido springs up along the mud banks opposite the Yacht Club. I bathed there one day, in company with that legendary figure, One-Arm Sutton, who helped to run the Mukden Arsenal for Chang Tso-lin, and is, I believe, the only Old Etonian claiming to hold the rank of General in the Chinese Army. Monstrous women sported like hippopotami in the shallows. The beauties from the night-clubs, heavily made up, minced beside their potbellied escorts in costumes which were hardly more than a figure of speech. A few slim Chinese, burnt copper by the sun, dived and laughed and splashed each other like children. The native boatmen, old-fashioned to the core, eyed with a scorn which had once been horror the modes and manners of the foreign women.
But what lent the scene its extra and redeeming touch of oddity was the presence, everywhere along this grotesquely decorated shore, of soldiers and police armed with rifles and automatics. Martyrs to boredom and to heat, they watched the bathers with a sullen envy. To the people I was with they were a normal and inevitable sight. Nobody mentioned bandits, except as a joke. But when the girls, who had withdrawn to undress behind some tombs, failed to reappear within the expected period, the jokes grew more and more perfunctory, and soon it was apparent that a nice problem for the chivalrous had been raised. But in the end our anxious whistles were answered and everyone was reassured.
In Harbin I first began to pass myself off on people as a Special Correspondent of the Times. (For obvious reasons, I had kept quiet about this in Russia.) I immediately discovered that I had come all this way without ascertaining what exactly were the duties of a Special Correspondent, or how they should be discharged. The great thing, I decided, was to Preserve an Open Mind. This entailed the minimum of exertion on my part and was really very easy, because I started by knowing nothing, and everything that people told me I forgot.
But to describe in detail the process of preserving an open mind might, I fear, alienate the sympathies of my readers. I will therefore pass over the subject of my professional activities in Harbin and go on to the next place, noting only in passing that in Harbin I entered for the first time the portals of an opium den. (We writers, as I dare say you have noticed, always describe the means of ingress to any haunt of vice as ‘portals’.)
In my experience all opium dens are small, stuffy, and extremely disappointing to regular readers of fiction; in these respects, if in no others, they resemble the dressing-rooms of actresses. My first den was no exception to this rule. It was empty, save for a facetious attendant and one very old man, stretched out neatly on a wooden couch. He was asleep and, no doubt, dreaming. His features wore a look of the most profound boredom.
I refused a pipe and left the building.