Editor's note: In the more than two hundred years that the Qing Dynasty occupied Sakhalin Island, it seems that no imperial court official, a feudal official, or even the three-surnamed deputy governor with exclusive responsibility has visited the island once; famous or unnamed literati in China, including the out-of-power officials and fallen scholars who exiled Ninguta, have not seen anyone who has been there, and no one has ever been concerned about the survival and death of the compatriots on the island.
Original title | Shi Haiyushen: How many years has Sakhalin Left China?
Source | Prophet's Bookstore
Author | Bu key
In my research and writing experience, this book is not easy, too little reliable literature, too many unclear clues, too complex entangled emotions to bring in, and at the end of this introduction, another question mark jumped out -
How many years has Sakhalin left China?
▲ "Jilin Public Opinion Map", drawn during the Guangxu period, specially marked on Sakhalin Island: "All the people living in the continent are Kuye, Feiyaka, and Orunchun, and there are twenty-one tuns." "Original dimensions: 96 cm x 176 cm, now in the Library of Congress. (The way this map is drawn and viewed is: up, south, north, left, east, right, west)
▌How Sakhalin Island was lost
Legally speaking, it can be traced back to the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing exactly 160 years ago, on the second day of the first month of october in the 10th year of the Qing Xianfeng Decade, on November 14, 1860 AD, and on November 2 in the Russian Julian calendar.
It was an early winter afternoon, the signing time was set at 2 p.m., and Prince Gong Yixun delayed by an hour and a half to arrive at the Russian Pavilion in the southern city. Is the road difficult to navigate when the soldiers are in turmoil? Or is it to regain a little dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty?
In his diary, Weng Xincun of Tirenge University said that the day was "as sunny and warm as yesterday", but there was no word involved in the Sino-Russian negotiations, which proved that the operation of this matter was extremely confidential. At that time, about a month had passed since the capital was lost and the Yuanmingyuan had been burned down by the British and French forces, and the Xianfeng Emperor Yixuan and a group of close courtiers were still hiding in the summer resort, and Prince Gong Yixuan, who was ordered to stay in Yihe, did not dare to stay in the capital, and took a group of people and horses to roam the outskirts of Beijing, living in an uncertain place.
▲ Ai Xinjue Luo Yixuan
After the situation eased slightly, Prince Gong was ordered to negotiate with the aggressors and signed three treaties. The order of signing the contracts was mysterious, the first with the British Minister Erkin, then with the French Minister Gro, and finally with the Russian Minister Ignatiev.
The British and French ministers forced the Qing court to obey by relying on poor military force, posing as a pretentious appearance of the occupying army, specially riding in a green tweed caravan carried by eight people, the leader of the band, the elite soldiers, and the big Ang Ang entered the lobby of the ceremonial department and signed the contract in a high profile; while Ignatiev, the young and handsome Russian minister who was a military attaché of Alexander II, took the initiative to fall last, and the signing place was also changed to the Russian South Pavilion.
Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev
Xiao Yi was humble and well-mannered, and in most cases he showed patience, but the most cunning (forgive me for using such a word for a diplomat), and the most ruthless, occupying a large area of land on the left bank of the Heilongjiang River and east of the Ussuri River.
However, a careful examination of the text of the "Sino-Russian Beijing Treaty" does not contain the name of Sakhalin Island, and then look at the "Treaty of Yaohun" signed by Yishan two years ago, and there is no mention of this large offshore island at all.
▲ Tsarist Russia occupied Chinese territory through the "Yaohun Treaty" and the "Sino-Russian Beijing Treaty"
In a long and long historical period, Sakhalin Island, as the largest island in China, is flanked by the mouth of the Heilongjiang River at the northern end, and flows southward, guarding the vast northeast China mainland, enjoying the reputation of "great sand protection".
In the early years of the Qing Dynasty, taking advantage of the Manchurian rulers' march into Guannei and the central plains, the Cossacks began to invade the Heilongjiang River Valley, and some Luocha Fortress villages appeared from the left bank from top to bottom, and the tribes such as Daur and Solun were forced to move to the right bank, and the lower river area and the northern end of Sakhalin Island were also disturbed.
The Kangxi Emperor resolutely used troops, twice sent large armies to attack Yaksa, forcing the Russian government to sign the Treaty of Nebuchu, clearing the enemy villages east of the Erguna River and south of the Waixing'an Mountains, and regaining peace on Sakhalin Island, which was located in a corner.
▲ Situation map of the Battle of Kangxi Yaksa
A few years later, the Russian court requested the establishment of a "Russian Pavilion" in the Beijing Division, managed by the Orthodox Mission to China, responsible for academic affairs, diplomacy and commerce in Beijing, and regularly sent students to learn Chinese and Manchu. However, the Qing monarchs had no desire to learn from Russia, and they had no idea that this northern neighbor was getting stronger and stronger, and they were obsessed with heilongjiang.
The past is hard to look back on. By the time Chekhov planned to investigate the island, the vast land on the left bank of the Heilongjiang River and east of the Ussuri River had already "changed its surname", and Sakhalin Island had become the Sakhalin of Tsarist Russia. The name also comes from the gushing Heilongjiang River, which the Manchu language calls "Sakhalin Ulla". Sakhalin, meaning black; Ula is also written as Ula, i.e. River.
▌ Follow Chekhov to touch the land
In the early spring of 1860, Chekhov was born in the city of Taganrog on the Azov Sea. His family enslaved himself for generations until the Tsar announced the abolition of serfdom, and it was not until his father's generation that he was freed.
Chekhov graduated from a medical school, began to write during his studies, and gradually became a shining star in the Russian literary world, but the money in his pocket was always not enough to spend. The sentence at the beginning of the volume is a little sensational, (I sit at home all day reading and taking notes.) There was nothing else in my head or on my paper, only Sakhalin. It's a kind of madness, Sakhalin island madness. From his letter of March 9, 1890 to A. Sheikh Suvorin.
Suvorin was a close friend and publisher in Petersburg, from whom Chekhov's works were mostly printed and distributed. Chekhov, who lived in Moscow, was preparing for his trip to Sakhalin Island and wrote many letters to Suvorin, asking him to help collect relevant documents and maps, and requesting some advance payment. This year Chekhov has just turned 30 years old, and our Sakhalin Island officially became Russia's Sakhalin, and it is about to turn 30 years.
▲ The exile of Tsarist Russia: Sakhalin Island in 1891
"Since ancient times", is a highly used diplomatic hot word, in recent years has encountered some doubts, thinking that the expression is general, used for Sakhalin Island is roughly not bad - thousands of years of spring wind and autumn, its exchanges with the Chinese dynasty are recorded in the records, the historical relics are vague and endless.
However, it can only be said before the Daoguang of the Qing Dynasty: from the xianfeng dynasty, the Russian army carried out armed occupation of it; by the time Chekhov made up his mind to go to the island, it was decades later that the Russian-ruled Sakhalin had become a notorious island of hard labor. By "pilgrimage," he meant to experience and experience the human suffering in that land with the conscience of a writer.
▲ Prisoners exiled on Sakhalin Island, who are chained to trolleys and forced labor
In June 1893, about three years after the end of the Kouba page trip, Chekhov's Journey to Sakhalin was finalized. One of the reasons is that he has to publish some works to support his family, and more importantly, it should be the difficulty of writing books, and picking out the cards recorded in the evil prison room is often accompanied by painful and fearful memories.
More than a hundred years later, when I read this thin and heavy work, Sakhalin has been depicted like a paradise, but what haunts me is still the distortion and sadness of human nature at that time, the "rough prison coat" in Chekhov's "prose closet".
I used to know almost nothing about Sakhalin Island, and it was chekhov's "Sakhalin Travels" that triggered the obsession with that land. Chekhov's trip to Sakhalin Island was a one-man expedition, a journey of more than 10,000 versts of mountains and rivers and frequent dangers, leaving aside the prosperity of the city and the fame of the literary world, at that time his body was also in a state of condition, and he still insisted on the trip.
The state of life of Sakhalin Islanders in the 1890s
As a Chinese, I cannot but think that in the more than two hundred years that the Qing Dynasty took Possession of Sakhalin Island, it seems that no imperial court official, a feudal official, or even a deputy governor with three surnames who has a special responsibility has landed on the island once; the famous or unnamed literati and inkers in China, including the out-of-power officials and fallen scholars who exiled Ningguta, have not seen anyone go there, and no one has ever seen anyone concerned about the survival and death of the compatriots on the island.
In the Tang Dynasty, there were border poets, who accompanied the army on expeditions, dyed the desolate wonders of the absolute domain and killed them immediately, and stirred up the heroic spirit of Confucianism and serving the country between the sentences, which should be difficult to see in the northeast frontier of the Qing Dynasty. There were exile poetry societies in the Ninggu Pagoda of the border city, and some scholars called those works "the border poems of the Qing Dynasty", especially the "Autumn Collection" of Wu Zhaoqian, a talented son of Jiangnan, as an example. Wu Shi has a poem that should be written at the mouth of the Heilongjiang River, when he was the husband of the patrol officers and soldiers, opposite the blue sakhalin island, but the poet thought in his heart, about how to get out of the bitter sea and return to the interior as soon as possible...
The reasons for the loss of Sakhalin Island are complex, including the peeping and infiltration of the two close neighbors of Tsarist Russia and Japan, theft and seizure, division and seizure, while I reflect more on the indifference of the Qing court, including the collective neglect of most of the Chinese people. This is also the strong feeling brought about by reading Chekhov, just in terms of the feelings of the students, why can he cross the twenty thousand miles of difficult journeys with illness, while the Qing Dynasty literati who are only thousands of miles away have never seen and walked on the island?
Of course, people can find all kinds of reasons, and what I want to ask is the soul, whether there has ever been attention and concern, concern and compassion. I remember talking about this at a party, and one of the people present asked softly:
Have you been there?
Sakhalin Island is an eternal pain in the hearts of the Chinese people.
Since the middle of the 19th century, Sakhalin Island, which once belonged to China, has become sakhalin in Tsarist Russia, and has become a russian island of hard labor for prisoners; to this day, it still has a special knot in the hearts of many Chinese people, a lingering complexity and heaviness.
What is even more distressing is that as a sensitive topic, in some years, talking about Sakhalin Island also needs to be very careful, and the historical works about Sakhalin Island are almost blank.