¹ See Lahusen, T., ‘A place called Harbin: reflections on a centennial’, China Quarterly, 154 (1998), 400–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Three books by Elena Taskina centre on the cultural life and literary heritage of the Russian emigration: E.P. Taskina and D.G. Sel'kina (eds.), Kharbin: vetka russkogo dereva (Harbin: a branch of the Russian tree) (Novosibirsk, 1991); E.P. Taskina, Neizvestnyi Kharbin (The unknown Harbin) (Moscow, 1994); E.P. Taskina (ed.), Russkii Kharbin (Russian Harbin) (Moscow, 1998; 2nd rev. and enlarged edn, 2005). A tetralogy by Georgii Melikhov began with a survey of the early diplomatic and political history of the Chinese Eastern Railway, to continue with a study of Harbin's transition from a colonial outpost to an emigration centre, an evocation of the daily life of the émigré community and an assessment of the role of the Russian emigration in international diplomacy leading up to the Japanese invasion: see, respectively, G.V. Melikhov, Man'chzhuriia dalekaia i blizkaia (Manchuria far and near) (Moscow, 1991); idem, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae, 1917–1924 gg. (The Russian emigration in China, 1917–24) (Moscow, 1997); idem, Belyi Kharbin: seredina 20-kh (The White Harbin: mid-1920s) (Moscow, 2003); idem, Rossiikaia emigratsiia v mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniiakh na Dal'nem Vostoke 1925–1932 (The Russian emigration in Far Eastern international relations, 1925–32) (Moscow, 2007). In addition to the titles just mentioned, a number of personal memoirs by former Russian residents in China have appeared.

³ See N.E. Ablova, KVZhD i rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae: mezhdunarodnye i politicheskie aspekty istorii (pervaia polovina XX veka) (The CER and the Russian emigration in China: international and political aspects of history in the first half of the twentieth century) (Moscow, 2005). The prolific publications of Amir Khisamutdinov focus on émigré biography and bibliography: see e.g. his Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskom regione i Iuzhnoi Amerike: Biobibliograficheskii slovar’ (A bio-bibliographical dictionary of the Russian emigration in the Asia-Pacific region and South America) (Vladivostok, 2001); idem, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae: opyt entsiklopedii (A draft encyclopaedia of the Russian emigration in China) (Vladivostok, 2002). Other scholars in the Russian Far East have published on subjects as diverse as Russian architecture in Manchuria, the situation of the Russians under Manchukuo rule, the institutions of Russian education in Harbin, Russian women in Manchuria, Russian sinologists in Manchuria, Russian books in China and the Chinese historiography of the Russian emigration.

⁴ A book by the Harbin historian Ji Fenghui was the first to challenge the established view of the Russian emigration as merely the continuation of tsarist-period colonialism: see his Haerbin xungen (Harbin's search for roots) (Harbin, 1996). Russian–Chinese cultural interaction was demonstrated on the basis of concrete material in Liu Xinxin and Liu Xueqing, Haerbin xiyang yinyueshi (The history of Western music in Harbin) (Beijing, 2002).

⁵ E.g. Li Xinggeng (ed.), Fengyu fuping: Eguo qiaomin zai Zhongguo (1917–1945) (Floating weeds in the storm: Russian emigrants in China, 1917–45) (Beijing, 1997); Shi Fang, Gao Ling and Liu Shuang, Haerbin Eqiao shi (The history of Russian emigrants in Harbin) (Harbin, 1998).

⁶ A more extensive analysis of shifts in historical writing in Russia and China is undertaken in Gamsa, M., ‘The historiography of Harbin and the imagery of inter-ethnic contact’, Asiatica Venetiana, 10–11 (2009), 63–79Google Scholar.

⁷ Quested, R.K.I., ‘Matey’ Imperialists? The Tsarist Russians in Manchuria, 1895–1917 (Hong Kong, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁸ Clausen, S. and Thøgersen, S., The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin (Armonk, NY, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁹ Ristaino, M.R., Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Patrikeeff, F., Russian Politics in Exile: The Northeast Balance of Power, 1924–1931 (Basingstoke, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Bakich, O., Harbin Russian Imprints: Bibliography as History, 1898–1961. Materials for a Definitive Bibliography (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹² Wolff, D., To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914 (Stanford, 1999)Google Scholar.

¹³ Carter, J.H., Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916–1932 (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Among these publications are Mitter, R., The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000)Google Scholar; Gottschang, T.R. and Lary, D., Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matsusaka, Yoshihisa Tak, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 (Cambridge, MA, 2001)Google Scholar; Suleski, Ronald, Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization and Manchuria (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Tamanoi, M.A. (ed.), Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire (Honolulu, 2005)Google Scholar. The journal East Asian History published a special issue (no. 30, Dec. 2005) on ‘Manchuria as a borderland’.

¹⁵ Thøgersen, S., ‘Competing Chinese views on the historical role of the Russians in Harbin’, Revue des études slaves, 73, 2–3 (2001), 316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Kirby, William C., ‘The internationalization of China: foreign relations at home and abroad in the republican era’, in Wakeman, F. Jr, and Edmonds, R.L. (eds.), Reappraising Republican China (Oxford, 2000), 202Google Scholar.

¹⁷ An exploration of such contacts was offered in the early chapters of Stephan, J.J., The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See, for example, Andreyev, C. and Savicky, I., Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1918–1938 (New Haven, 2004)Google Scholar, which opens with a chapter on ‘Relations between Czechs and Russians’. Outside the Russian and Chinese contexts, comparative insights into the workings of a city that served as the meeting place of different ethnic groups may be found, for example, in Mark Mazower's recent history of Thessalonica: see Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York, 2006).

¹⁹ See Brunero, D., Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854–1949 (London, 2006)Google Scholar. Hans van de Ven focuses on the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, so as to demonstrate the historical importance of late Qing and republican China's interaction with foreign countries, in his ‘Globalizing Chinese history’, History Compass, 2 (2004), 1–5.

²⁰ This is a key argument in Karl Schlögel's work: in this context, see especially his monumental study of Russian-German Berlin, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1998). The application of the spatial approach to the Harbin case has now been proposed in K. Schlögel, ‘Reading time in space: mapping cultural junctions’, paper presented at the conference ‘Global challenge and regional response – early twentieth-century northeast China and Harbin: their social, cultural, economic and political encounters with the world’, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, 19 Jun. 2009.

²¹ An approach distinguishing between ‘Britain’ and ‘Britons’ (some of whom would call themselves ‘Shanghailanders’ – the English parallel of the Russian kharbintsy) is taken by Bickers, R., Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900–1949 (Manchester and New York, 1999)Google Scholar. Reardon-Anderson, J., Reluctant Pioneers: China's Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford, 2005)Google Scholar, notes that the few available studies of ‘China's borderlands during the Qing and Republican periods share a state-centered approach. . .while dealing only tangentially with the motives and behaviors of the Chinese who moved to and settled in these regions’ (160); they ‘say little or nothing about Chinese society in these border areas’ (162).

²² Kirby, W.C., ‘Intercultural connections and Chinese development: external and internal spheres of modern China's foreign relations’, in Wakeman, F. Jr, and Xi, Wang (eds.), China's Quest for Modernization: A Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1997), 217Google Scholar.

²³ Subsuming them under the broad heading of ‘a comparative perspective’, I will not enter here into the differences between the methods of enquiry just mentioned. Among the stimulating chapters in Cohen, D. and O'Connor, M. (eds.), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York and London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cf. M. Miller, ‘Comparative and cross-national history: approaches, differences, problems’, which argues that, despite having different objectives, ‘cross-national and comparative histories are complementary rather than competing methods’ (in ibid., 126).

²⁴ Esherick, J.W., ‘Modernity and nation in the Chinese city’, in idem (ed.), Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu, 1999), 6Google Scholar. D.D. Buck, ‘Railway city and national capital: two faces of the modern in Changchun’, in Esherick (ed.), Remaking the Chinese City, 68, also applies to Harbin the concept of the ‘dual city’ (cf. 78), referring to a city clearly divided into Western and Chinese areas of settlement.

²⁵ J.N. Wasserstrom, ‘Locating Old Shanghai’, in Esherick (ed.), Remaking the Chinese city, here 195. Cf. idem, ‘Comparing “incomparable” cities: postmodern L.A. and Old Shanghai’, Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science, 5, 3 (1996), 69–90, an essay seeking to refute ‘exceptionalist’ approaches to urban history.

²⁶ Wasserstrom, ‘Locating Old Shanghai’, 198.

²⁷ Cf. the parallel study of Shanghai and St Petersburg, as magnets for peasant migration and settings for the development of new urban identities, in Smith, S.A., Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ This question is raised about Shanghai in Wen-hsin Yeh, ‘Shanghai modernity: commerce and culture in a republican city’, in Wakeman and Edmonds (eds.), Reappraising Republican China, 121–40, here 127. Already Sidney D. Gamble, in the Preface to his Peking: A Social Survey (London, 1921), xiii, argued that the treaty ports ‘could hardly be called Chinese cities’. Problems of urban modernity are at the centre of work surveyed in Bun, Kwan Man, ‘Chinese urban history: four cheers’, Urban History, 29, 2 (2002), 254–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ See, for example, Ho, V. Kit-yiu, ‘The limits of hatred: popular attitudes toward the West in republican Canton’, East Asian History, 2 (Dec. 1991), 87–104Google Scholar.

³⁰ Lattimore, Owen, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict, 2nd rev. edn (New York, 1935), 260Google Scholar.

³¹ Strand, David, ‘“A high place is no better than a low place”: the city in the making of modern China’, in Yeh, Wen-hsin (ed.), Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley, 2000), at 100–1Google Scholar.

³² Bayly, C.A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), 10 (emphasis in the original)Google Scholar.

³³ A very useful analysis of three generations of Russians in Manchuria is Bakich, Olga, ‘Emigré identity: the case of Harbin’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 99, 1 (2000), 51–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ See Gottschang and Lary, Swallows and Settlers.

³⁵ See Carter, Creating a Chinese Harbin.

³⁶ Describing these initiatives in detail, Carter's ch. 5, ‘A Chinese place’, ibid., takes them too much at face value. Nationalist feeling may have been less important in the construction of the temples (from 1924 to 1929) than had been political calculation, and competition between two successive Chinese administrators.

³⁷ Mitter, The Manchurian Myth, esp. chs. 3 and 4.

³⁸ This comparison need not be limited to ports within a single country: cf. the special issue on port cities in Comparativ, 17, 2 (2007); and Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2008). Contemporary Chinese cities are examined in comparison with cities across the world in J.R. Logan (ed.), Urban China in Transition (Oxford, 2008).

³⁹ Quested, ‘Matey’ Imperialists?, 102; Clausen and Thøgersen, The Making of a Chinese City, 31. The Chinese names of these city districts all have meanings of their own, and are not translations of the Russian.

⁴⁰ See the excellent recent study by E.I. Nesterova, Russkaia administratsiia i kitaiskie migranty na Iuge Dal'nego Vostoka Rossii (Vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX vv.) (The Russian administration and Chinese migrants in the south of the Russian Far East, late nineteenth – early twentieth century) (Vladivostok, 2004).

⁴¹ Sahadeo, J., ‘Epidemic and empire: ethnicity, class, and “civilization” in the 1892 Tashkent cholera riot’, Slavic Review, 64, 1 (2005), 117–39, at 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The continuity between Harbin city planning and earlier Russian urban experience in Asia is often ignored, but realization of it helps make Harbin less ‘unique’ than commonly claimed: thus the name of its best-known street, Kitaiskaia ulitsa (Chinese Street), was familiar from several Siberian and Far Eastern cities. Even Harbin's ‘Nakhalovka’ (from the Russian nakhal'stvo, brazenness) was a generic name for town quarters settled without legal permission; see, for example, Suny, R.G., ‘Tiflis: crucible of ethnic politics, 1860–1905’, in Hamm, M.F. (ed.), The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington, 1986), here 254Google Scholar.

⁴² This division of the city was noticed and described by visitors before the Russo-Japanese war: see Labbé, P., Les Russes en Extrême-Orient (Paris, 1904), 206–8Google Scholar; Enselme, H.M.J.A. and de Bouillane de Lacoste, É.A.H., A travers la Mandschourie. Le chemin de fer de l'est chinois (Paris, 1903), 47Google Scholar.

⁴³ Cf. Georg, O., ‘From Hill Station (Freetown) to downtown Conakry (First Ward): comparing French and British approaches to segregation in colonial cities at the beginning of the twentieth century’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 32, 1 (1998), 1–31Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Guo, Qinghua, ‘Changchun: unfinished capital planning of Manzhouguo, 1932–42’, Urban History, 31, 1 (May 2004), 100–17, here 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Guo, Qinghua, ‘Shenyang: the Manchurian ideal capital city and imperial palace, 1625–43’, Urban History, 27, 3 (2000), 344–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 355. As early as in 1644, the first year of their rule over China, ‘the Qing ordered that the conquerors live apart from conquered subjects’: see Rawski, E., ‘The Qing Empire during the Qianlong reign’, in Millward, J.A. et al. . (eds.), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (London, 2004), 16Google Scholar. An edict banning Han Chinese residence in the Inner City of Beijing was issued in 1648.

⁴⁶ Isett, C.M., ‘Village regulation of property and the social basis for the transformation of Qing Manchuria’, Late Imperial China, 25, 1 (2004), 124–86, here 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ See Lee, R.H.G., The Manchurian Frontier in Ch'ing History (Cambridge, MA, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Cf. P. Baldwin, ‘Comparing and generalizing: why all history is comparative, yet no history is sociology’, in Cohen and O'Connor (eds.), Comparison and History, 1–22, esp. 11.

⁴⁹ F.W. Boal, ‘Questions from a frontier city’, paper presented at the conference ‘Together but apart: ethnically mixed cities – a comparative approach’, Tel Aviv University, Israel, 10 Nov. 2004. The ‘frontier city’ was Belfast, where, as of 2001, 75 per cent of the population lived in segregated (Protestant or Catholic) areas rather than in mixed neighbourhoods, a ratio higher than ever before in the city's history. Cf. Boal, F.W., ‘Belfast: walls within’, Political Geography, 21 (2002), 687–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ See Koga, Yukiko, ‘“The atmosphere of a foreign country”: Harbin's architectural inheritance’, in Cronin, A.M. and Hetherington, K. (eds.), Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory, Spectacle (New York and London, 2008), 221–53Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Kanglei Wang, ‘When replicas turn real: China reconstructs its Russian past’, The Yale Globalist, 31 Oct. 2008. At this writing, the gardens have not yet opened to the public. For providing additional information on this and other recent ventures of the Harbin memory industry, I thank Prof. Dan Ben-Canaan of the School of Western Studies, Heilongjiang University.