Recently, the song created by Douyin musician Liu Shuang last year, "Mohe Ballroom", suddenly became popular. In fact, this is a mourning song, "Mohe Ballroom" was inspired by a solo dancing old man, whose background was the "May 6" forest fire that occurred in Daxinganling in 1987.
When it came to writing songs, no one expected it
A small underground dance hall suddenly became popular all over the country
When it comes to Mohe, people have no better impression of it than the northernmost part of China mentioned in textbooks. In fact, this is also a business card of Mohe's official external publicity, mainly searching for "Mohe" on major media platforms, and all that comes with "North" is the content.
"Mohe is located in the northernmost part of China", perhaps most Chinese people do not know what this means, and there is no intuitive concept of this, the main reason is not to understand the sense of spatial distance in it.
Northeast China, as a complete and relatively independent physical geographical area in northeast China, the people of the three eastern provinces may be stunned for a moment if they call themselves Liaoning/Heilongjiang/Jilin or other urban people to people in other regions, but if you call yourself Northeast, they will often have a suddenly enlightened expression.
The main reason for this phenomenon is that the northeast region is easy to give outsiders a sense of "ironclad" unity, coupled with the fact that the provinces of the three northeastern provinces will be relatively close to each other, so people in other regions can easily mistakenly think that the northeast is very small. In fact, the northeast is not big, but very big!
In fact, the three northeastern provinces are not all of the northeast, in fact, the city of Dongsimeng in Inner Mongolia is also an inseparable part of the northeast, and the Xilingol League, located in the north of China and in the middle of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is sometimes included in the northeast region.
The Mohe River, the northernmost part of China, is the best political situation to reflect the size of the northeast region. The Mohe River, located in the north of Heilongjiang Province, is actually a trip from the Mohe River to Dalian, the southernmost point in the northeast, which is almost the same as the distance from Shijiazhuang to Shenzhen.
Today, Mohe has become a county-level city, and its higher-level administrative unit is not a prefecture-level city, but (Daxinganling area). Seeing this, you may wonder that this area is also a Chinese administrative unit? In fact, in today's China, in addition to the special administrative unit of the Daxinganling region, there are two largest provincial-level administrative units in China, the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Although the name Mohe China's Arctic is widely used in textbooks, in fact, outsiders' understanding of Mohe is limited to textbooks. In fact, as far as Mohe's business card is concerned, most Chinese people do not know the specific situation of this "northernmost part of China", and even "looking for the north" (looking for the northernmost part of China) is also a difficult "technical work".
What everyone does not know is that in fact, in the late Qing Dynasty more than a hundred years ago, the cold desert river attracted the attention of a large number of Europeans and Americans overnight, and they traveled thousands of miles across the ocean to this Ninguta area that once belonged to the exiled sinners. Even the Russians established an "illegal state" here, and its related ruins are still preserved to this day.
Do you think Mohe Town is the northernmost part of China? No, no, no, this is just the northernmost county-level administrative center in China. I don't know if you remember how textbooks define China's northernmost country? The textbook reads: "The northernmost point of the mainland is located on the center line of the main channel of the Heilongjiang River north of about 53°N", and this location is the Ussuri Shoal, 149 kilometers northeast of Mohe City.
Ussuri Shoal got its name from the Ussuri Karen (equivalent to a border post) set up here in the Qing Dynasty, so the area is also called "Karen Town". Here, you can see all the most authentic landscapes related to the "Chinese Arctic", the northernmost boundary pile of China's land (China's northernmost geographical coordinate point), China's northernmost waters, the "China's northernmost point" large stone stele, China's northernmost map, etc., at a glance. In addition, the first bay of longjiang next door to ussuri shoal is also a beautiful place to go. During the Qing Dynasty, it was also an important hunting ground for the inhabitants of Orunchun. This is the real northernmost point of China!
After two hundred years of hunting and living in this area, an old hunter of Orunchun found many golden seedlings when he buried horses in the area near the rouge ditch (also known as the old Jingou) of the present-day Jingou Forest Farm, and it is said that the old hunter at that time could find a considerable amount of gold sand by casually fishing a handful of river sand at the bottom of the river.
Russia, which had been trying to infiltrate the northeast for hundreds of years, finally extended its claws to this land more than two hundred years after the Battle of Yaksa.
After the old gold ditch dug a pit to bury the horse and found gold, the sudden harvest surprised him, so he informed the Russian small gold miner Shereed King, who immediately sent mining engineers to take some workers to the trial mining. It didn't matter, the gold that was dug up spoiled the crowd.
In fact, the presence of gold here is no secret in the local area. As early as 1860, there were Russians who secretly crossed the border to steal gold sand in the desert river area of the mainland. However, because the Qing Dynasty still had a large number of troops left here at that time, the Russians could not sneak across the border in large numbers. It is for this reason that the Russians have never found large gold deposits.
As with the gold rush in the western United States, news of the inadvertent discovery of huge amounts of gold sand spread around the area, and a large number of gold miners flocked to it, and by the beginning of the second year, the number of gold miners soon increased to 5,000 to 7,000.
The composition of these people is complex, the Russians have the highest proportion, and their composition is equally complex, in addition to miners, fugitives, Siberian craftsmen, cossacks, retired officials, merchants. The second highest proportion of ethnic groups are chinese (including Han, Manchu, Mongolian, etc.), after all, this is their ancestral land. In addition, there are Koreans, Jews, Germans, French, Poles, Americans and various adventurers from other American countries.
China's Arctic town became a paradise for adventurers around the world. Due to the complexity of the membership, especially the concentration of many fugitives and adventurers, the gold mine was chaotic, with strife, theft and various violent incidents.
It would have been fine if the strife had been a skirmish, but one day in December 1884, a cook was brutally beaten to death with a sledgehammer, causing a great panic directly in the mine.
After the incident, the heads and faces of the gold mine held a meeting, and finally after 6 days of discussion, it was decided to elect a person responsible for maintaining order and discipline in the mine, and gave him the name of the director of the Gold Mine in Zhele tuga, and this person was of course Sheledkin.
With the advice and direct involvement of the newly elected mine manager, a new local body was established. Thus, a new miniature "state" with a colonial atmosphere in the Far East was born, its name is "Zhele (Er) Tuga Gold Mining Republic", because of the problem of transliteration, Zhele Tuga is sometimes translated as "Shiduka (Ha, Ke)", "Extreme (Er) Tujia" and other words, its name of the Zhele Tuga River is the upper reaches of the Heilongjiang River, but the specific tributaries of the Heilongjiang River and where the location is, due to documentary reasons, there are many controversies.
After the formal "founding of the country", the normal operation of the state system began. In the same month, in addition to electing the supreme chief "elders", the resident assembly also divided the district according to the number of winter houses, and the district chiefs had two auxiliary "elders".
The gold miners were also divided into hundreds of working groups of ten to fifteen people, with the number of groups "more than seven hundred" from 1884 to 1885.
The "Republic of Zeretuga" is small, and it has even established its own "separation of powers" here. The "legislature" is the Parliament, which formulates laws and regulations and exercises the power to legislate and decide; the "administrative organ" is the office responsible for the implementation of the Decisions of the Council; the "judicial organ" is the court, and its punishment is divided into staff, hanging, etc., of which the elders and district chiefs who commit crimes are removed from office and handed over to the court for punishment.
As for the food and clothing supply of the people in the gold mines, at first it mainly came from the towns of Otun along the border, but with the increase in the number of pirates, merchants or residents of Hailanpao, Baikal, Irkutsk, Nebuchu, Chita and other places also came here to sell grain and groceries.
Just like places like Vladivostok, "the country" is also centered on a street called "Million", which is built in the European style, and there are bakeries, hotels, inns, bathhouses, playgrounds, zoos, bands and other shops along the street during the boom. Entertainment venues are even as many as "one hundred and fifty", and most of them are spacious wooden bungalows.
The main street is lined with a wooden shelter of miners, the center of the street is the gold mine hall with eleven windows, there is a hanging bell in front of the building, two iron cannons on both sides, on the right is a thatched church with organ prayer, and on the left is a warehouse with a gunpowder warehouse under it.
Due to the cold weather in the Mohe area, there are not many opportunities to obtain vitamins, and scurvy is quite popular in the mine, so the gold mine also has a hospital, with wards, examination rooms, pharmacies, and kitchens.
The mining area also pays attention to the design of the road, "every ten miles there will be a more shed, the infantry two people guard it, and the horse soldiers patrol the road"; in addition, there are wooden signs nailed to the trees next to the road.
Although the rise of the "country" has nothing to do with the Russian government itself, because the population of the "country" is mainly Russian, the Russian government appreciates it, characterizing it as the first stronghold of Tsarist Russia to expand across the Heilongjiang River to China, and will be ready to merge like other annexed "countries" in the future. At the same time, Tsarist Russia also praised this place as the "California of Amur", which means the "forward" holy land comparable to California in the United States.
During this period, because Zuo Zongtang had just recovered his homeland in Xinjiang for less than ten years, and in addition to the Sino-French War, although France had won certain victories in the Vietnam battlefield and the Battle of Fujian and Taiwan, it had never been able to annex Guangxi in the land war, and the Qing and French armies were held at Zhennanguan. The Qing Dynasty's strong resistance to the great powers caused panic in the Western world, and the "Yellow Peril Theory" once again occupied the market in public opinion in the Western world.
In this context, the evaluation of the "Republic of Zheletuga" by Europeans and Americans is also quite interesting, and many European newspapers and periodicals have published articles saying that "this is the first wonderful experiment of a new republican system in the barbaric and bloody Far East", and some commentators have also praised the "separation of powers" democratic system adopted here.
In practice, however, as more and more people gathered here, the phenomenon of miners being unemployed was also increasing, and coupled with its colonial nature, these "superior" systems were never implemented. The news of the establishment of the "Republic of Zheletuga" in the Qing Dynasty was actually unknown to the imperial court at the beginning, but later it became more and more noisy, and this matter became known to the world.
In view of the fact that the Sino-Russian Ili negotiations have just been completed and the Sino-French war is still continuing, the Qing government decided to solve the problem of Russian mining of Mohe gold through negotiation and peaceful means in order to avoid multi-front warfare. In this regard, the Qing government formulated a general policy of expulsion through negotiations and forced expulsion, on the one hand, to make Tsarist Russia reclaim the Russians who had crossed the river through negotiations, and on the other hand, to reorganize its armaments, abandon its illusions, and prepare for war.
In 1884, the deputy governor of Heilongjiang ordered people to investigate the Mohe River into the mountains, warning the Russians not to cross the border and return to Jiangzuo. However, the Russian side refused to withdraw, saying that the gold miners entered the territory of the Qing Dynasty through legal customs clearance procedures.
The negotiations failed, and the Heilongjiang general ordered people to search the Mohe Mountains in order to search for more evidence. In this search, more than 4,000 Russians were found in the local area, which greatly exceeded the expectations of the imperial court. Therefore, after a general understanding of the situation of the Mohe gold mine, the Qing government made many representations with the Russian governor of Blagoveshchensk (Hylanda).
In the face of sufficient evidence, Tsarist Russia knew that it was wrong, because of the situation in Europe at that time, it did not want to open up another battlefield. So in June 1885, the Russian governor of Amur was forced to issue a notice ordering the Russians to withdraw to Jiangbei, but secretly still encouraged the Russians to stay and wait for the opportunity to annex.
When the Heilongjiang general WenXu learned of this situation, he immediately sent people to Mohe to monitor the withdrawal of the Russians, and at the same time dispatched troops and horses to Mohe to prepare another set of plans, and if the negotiations failed, they would take advantage of the situation to expel them by force.
In August, Qing officials met with the Russian gold mining office committee, and the two sides found that more than 400 Russians had been evacuated and 1,000 Chinese had been expelled, but 1,300 Russians and 800 Chinese had not yet left the mountains.
The Qing court ordered the remaining people to go out of the mountain, but the Russian committee members declared, "The good people on the mainland have all gone out of the mountain, and there are many bandits and your countrymen stranded; because this is not Tsarist territory, the mainland cannot enter the army and forcibly expel them." "The aggressive intentions of Tsarist Russia made this expulsion incomplete, and later the gold miners gathered again and continued to mine.
When the turning point arrived in late August, the Russian governor of Amur stayed on the shore of mount Igornashen when he returned from Chita to Hailanpao, and Qing officials learned of this news and immediately came here to negotiate with him. However, the governor's remarks were similar to those of the previous commissioner, and he even believed that the Qing Dynasty could not eliminate the bandits, so he clearly stated that he would allow the Qing government to expel the Russians who were illegally staying in Mohe by force.
The Qing Dynasty once again made two preparations, on the one hand, to contact the Russian envoys and ask them to persuade the Russians to go out of the mountains and try not to hurt anyone, on the other hand, to continue to dispatch troops. This time, the Russians who were entrenched in the mountains saw the situation clearly, fled out of the mountains, and fled back to Russia, and then the Qing dynasty officers and soldiers also burned all the houses and cellars of Zheletuga, which was unexpected by Governor Amur. It is worth mentioning that the European critics at that time condemned the Qing court, saying that it was very bloody and violent.
However, after the destruction of the "Republic of Zheletuga", the Qing Dynasty, like the previous Battles of Yaksa, did not garrison the local troops, resulting in some Russians returning here later and "restoring the country" again.
These Russian bandits also had a certain combat effectiveness, and the Qing army had achieved little success in many small-scale liquidations, so they had no choice but to quickly increase their troops and advance in three ways, capturing a total of 343 Russians, escorting them out of the mountains, and returning them to Tsarist Russia.
At this point, the "Republic of Zheletuga", which had existed for more than a year, finally collapsed, and the Qing Dynasty also formally established the Mohe government-run gold mine in Zheletuga, which is the Rouge Ditch in mohe City today.
After this illegal country was eliminated, Tsarist Russia still cared about the land, and small groups of gold bandits continued to harass. In response to the passive situation, the imperial court transferred Li Jinyong to this place in 1887 to carry out the preparatory work for the establishment of the Mohe government-run gold mine. In October 1888, Li Jinyong arrived in Mohe to establish the Mohe Gold Mine, and the Mining Bureau was officially established.
Two years later, Li Jinyong finally became ill due to overwork and died in the Mohe Gold Mine. In order to commemorate the "Golden Sage" on the edge of Xingli Shibian, the locals built the Li Jinyong Ancestral Hall in Laojingou.
Today, the ancestral hall commemorating Li Jinyong and the opposite Guanyin Mountain look at the legendary land of Laojingou.
It is worth mentioning that the "Road of Songjie", which played an important supporting role during the Battle of Yaksa, was also re-opened up as the "Golden Road" under the auspices of Li Jinyong, and this post station road was extended westward into Laogou and Luogu River, and finally to Badaoka (in Inner Mongolia), adding 8 stations, reaching 33 stations.
Is the story of Mohe over here? In fact, there is no, "The Desert River is on fire" itself is also a story.
In today's era of Internet fast consumption, the pace of life is getting faster and faster. With the development of urbanization, and the population is increasingly concentrated in large cities. The sense of existence of small places is getting lower and lower, like a small transparency that has been forgotten in the torrent of the times.
The "siphon effect" of large cities on small cities also exists in the field of information.
Fortunately, through the short video platform represented by Douyin, the voice of small places will not be drowned out. In their own way, through vibrato, they are transmitting their voices to the outside world.
When Mohe met the limelight of "Mohe Ballroom", more and more people learned about Mohe through Douyin. All this has also attracted the attention of the local tourism department, and the official horse is the most deadly. The Mohe Municipal Bureau of Culture, Sports, Radio, Television and Tourism seized this good opportunity to promote Mohe Cultural Tourism and promote Mohe to netizens across the country through the Douyin platform.
Before that, Ding Zhen let more people know Litang through the smile on Douyin; the hot network #Shandong Caoxian 666, with a hot stem to make Caoxian break the circle; this time, a song "Mohe Ballroom" let people know the border town of Mohe... Short video platforms such as Douyin have brought social visibility to some county-level and township-level areas with tourism resources but low visibility, and promoted the development of local tourism. The cultural tourism industry will be a good way for these hidden treasure areas to move towards a richer future. In addition, they can also promote their hometown specialties through short video platforms, such as to Yunnan, and transport a large number of nuts around the world through the powerful logistics industry of e-commerce.
Every small place is worth seeing, and every small place is worth mining, which is an important embodiment of the social value created by the Internet. Without the mobile Internet, without e-commerce, without a developed logistics industry, without short videos, without vibrato, these treasure cities may never get the attention of most people, and their products will hardly be able to sell.
More desert river scenery, worth exploring, what they lack:
It's just an opportunity to show your style in front of the people of the whole country
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