This exquisite Russian Orthodox church, St. Nikolai, in the middle of Central Square, was built of wood without nails. It was destroyed by Red Guards in August 1966 during the Cultural Revolution.
HARBIN has surely one of the most extraordinary and varied histories of any city. It owes its existence principally to the Russian workers of the China Eastern Railway (see below), who built up the town at the turn of the 20th century. The second wave of Russians came in the 1920s when the city was flooded with some 100,000 White Russian refugees fleeing the Revolution, making it the largest Russian enclave outside Russia.
Harry Franck in his book Wandering in Northern China writes: "At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself back in Europe. He might easily believe he had crossed the line into Russia and brought up into one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture, customs, inhabitants, are all on the Russian model."
In 1931 Japan seized Manchuria and set up a puppet government. In the mid-1930s many Russians fled Harbin for the Soviet Union (where most were arrested, of course, for espionage or counterrevolutionary activity; some 30,000 were shot) or for China, to cities including Shanghai, Tientsin, Peking and Tsingtao.
G.H. Thomas, writing in November 1936 says of the foreign community in Tsingtao:
"There are quite a few Germans and Norwegians, and altogether about three hundred foreigners, not counting the Russians. These are White Russians, refugees from the Revolution, and have a strange standing in China. They are people without a country, and their lot is a sad one. "
IN 1945, when the Soviets occupied Manchuria, many of the remaining Russians were sent to labor camps. Manchuria was not completely in Chinese hands until 1952. By the mid-1960s, there were virtually no Harbin Russians left.
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