Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang Province, and the ancestors were also wide, and in 1115, the Jin Dynasty completed the establishment of a capital in the area of present-day Harbin Acheng, which was for the capital of Shangjing Huining Province. Later, however, the Jin Dynasty moved the capital to present-day Beijing in 1153. After that, Harbin's political status in the three dynasties of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties was relatively general, and the sense of existence was not high. During the Ming Dynasty, it was under the jurisdiction of the imperial court in the northeast of the Nuer Gandu Division. After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, Qianlong set up the deputy capital of Arachukha in the area of Acheng in the twenty-first year (1756), and Harbin was under its jurisdiction, which belonged to the jurisdiction of the Jilin general.
Frozen Songhua River
The rise of Harbin today comes from a railway. This railway has different names at different times, generally called the Middle East Railway, which is the abbreviation of "China's Oriental Railway". The Middle East Railway is a T-shaped railway line. The southeast-northwest horizontal is from Manzhouli to Suifenhe, which is today the Binzhou Line and the Binsui Line. The north-south vertical direction is Harbin to Dalian, which is today's Harbin-Dalian line. Harbin is the intersection of the T-shaped railway line.
Why did Harbin, which was inconspicuous in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, become the hub of the T-shaped railway? This has to start with the construction of the Middle East Railway and the geographical location of Harbin.
Harbin Station
The Middle East Railway, although it is a railway in China, is a railway built by Tsarist Russia, which was obviously built to more easily grab the interests of northeast China. In 1858 and 1860, through deception and intimidation, Tsarist Russia forced the Qing government to sign the Treaty of Yaohun and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, and the Qing government ceded about 600,000 square kilometers of territory north of the Heilongjiang River and south of the Waixing'an Mountains, as well as about 400,000 square kilometers of territory east of the Ussuri River, including Sakhalin Island, including the port of Vladivostok in the northeast. Vladivostok subsequently became an important Russian military base in the Far East, but its development was slow because it was too far from the Russian headquarters. So Russia planned to build a railway through northeast China to directly connect Vladivostok with its mainland. At the same time, with the cession of a large amount of territory in the outer northeast, Manzhouli and Suifenhe became border cities in China. After the Trans-Siberian Railway runs eastward via Lake Baikal, Manzhouli and the Suifen River are roughly in the direction of the railway to Vladivostok. Harbin, on the edge of the Songhua River, is right in the middle of these two railway ports.
Important nodes of the railway
After all, Vladivostok is not a year-round ice-free port, and for the Czarist Russia, which is obsessed with finding an ice-free port, it is also covetous of the Dalian area in Lushun, so the construction plan of the Middle East Railway naturally includes Dalian's route through Shenyang to the north. Looking at the map, you can see that Dalian-Shenyang-Changchun-Harbin are almost a straight line. In fact, Changchun was also a beneficiary of the railway, because before the construction of the railway, Jilin was the capital of Jilin Province (including the former Jilin generals).
In August 1898, the Construction of the Middle East Railway officially began, with Harbin as the center, divided into three lines of east, west and south, and the construction of the middle direction began at the same time from six places. In July 1903, the entire railway line was opened to traffic. Since then, a series of historical events have taken place around the Middle East Railway. In 1904, Tsarist Russia, which had been defeated in the Russo-Japanese War, ceded the Changchun-Dalian section of the railway to Japan. In 1929, the Northeast Army, which changed its flag and changed its banner, launched a war conflict with the Soviet Russia to recover the Middle East Railway, known as the Middle East Road Incident, which resulted in the defeat of the Northeast Army. On December 31, 1952, the China-Long Railway Middle East Railway was completely reclaimed by China and owned by China, managed by the Harbin Railway Administration.
Central Avenue
With the construction and opening of the Middle East Railway, a large number of population and industrial and commercial activities gathered in Harbin, Harbin gradually formed the prototype of a modern city, and became an international commercial port, has dozens of countries hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese gathered here, many countries set up consulates here, of course, Russia is the most influential of them. Today's Central Street in Harbin is full of exotic features, with dozens of European and imitation European buildings, bringing together Renaissance, Baroque, Eclectic and Modern Multi-style City Preservation Buildings. Gogol Street is named after a Russian celebrity.
Through the late Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China, the Puppet Manchu period, thanks to the intersection hub status of the T-shaped railway, Harbin has gradually developed into one of the largest international cities in northeast China. In 1946, Harbin became the first large city in the country to be liberated. Harbin is the seat of the Northeast Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and the Northeast Administrative Committee, as well as the political, economic and cultural center of the Northeast Liberated Area. Considering that Harbin was close to the big brother of the former Soviet Union and was the safest big city at that time, the Party Central Committee once considered Harbin as the capital of new China. Of course, after all, Harbin is in the northeast, far from the Central Plains and the south, and with the peaceful liberation of Beijing in the Pingjin Campaign, the location of the capital of new China, Beijing is unyielding. (Just kidding, Harbin, 800 years later, seems to have received a second critical hit from Beijing.) ）
Ice City
However, Harbin's good industrial and commercial foundation still made it an important central city in the northeast, and once became a municipality directly under the central government from 1953 to 1954. During the "First Five-Year Plan" period, Harbin was one of the key construction cities of the state, and more than ten key construction projects aided by the former Soviet Union were located in Harbin, and Harbin became an important industrial base of the country and quickly transformed from an industrial and commercial city into a new industrial city.
A corner of the city of Harbin
In recent years, due to climate, economic structure, business environment and other reasons, the entire northeast region, including Harbin, has declined economically, and the population loss has been serious. Heilongjiang, where Harbin is located, has the most serious population loss because it is located in the northernmost part of the northeast. Although the provincial capital Harbin has a permanent population of more than 10 million, it is the only city in the northeast with a population of more than 10 million, and its permanent population is also reduced by hundreds of thousands compared with the sixth census.
A T-shaped railway has brought opportunities for Harbin to take off, but the revitalization of the northeast requires Harbin and other cities to lead the entire northeast region to continue to find a new path of development. Go for it, old irons.