On May 28, 2023, the Russian side held a celebration in a very solemn manner to commemorate the 165th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Aihu. The location of this event is in "Blagoveshchensk", which is known as the lost land - Hyland Bubble.
As last year, local girls and young men dressed up in festive costumes and sang and danced at the "Treaty of Aihu" memorial tower. Russian border guards also very formally presented flowers to the memorial tower to honor the achievements of their ancestors in expanding the territory. Finally, the Russians also held a large celebration party that night, which can be described as a high-profile national festival.
For Russia, "Blagoveshchensk" is the result of conquest, the "City of Annunciation", representing their former glory. For Chinese, Hailan bubble is the place where the "Gengzi Russian disaster" occurred, and it is also a sad place that we can't bear to look back on. It carries our humiliating history, as well as thousands of our compatriots who have died in vain.
Although the "Gengzi Russian Disaster" that occurred in 1900 was extremely tragic, it was not as famous as the later "Nanjing Massacre", and it was rarely even mentioned by the Chinese people in recent decades. The perpetrators of this tragedy were the Russian government, and the victims were all Chinese residents.
"Gengzi Massacre" foreshadowing
When it comes to this horrific massacre, it is impossible to avoid the signing of the Treaty of Yaohun. About 600,000 square kilometers of land north of Heilongjiang and south of Outer Xing'an Ridge on the mainland were lost at this time.
In the Treaty of Yaohun, it was stipulated that although the Qing Dynasty had no sovereignty over Jiangdong Sixty-four Tun and other places, it still enjoyed permanent jurisdiction, and local residents also enjoyed permanent residency. It was this article that set the stage for the subsequent tragedy.
After the signing of this unequal treaty, the Qing government at the time did not recognize it for the sake of face, but dismissed the Heilongjiang general Yishan from his post for unauthorized cession of territory. However, only two years later, the Qing government recognized the Treaty of Yaohun when it signed the Treaty of Beijing with the Russian government, which was equivalent to pumping itself in the face with the sole of a shoe.
The Russians, on the other hand, did not want to make a name for themselves but only focus on reality, and continued to encroach on the territory of the Qing Dynasty after the signing of the Treaty of Yaohun, and at the same time began to implement the immigration plan, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of Russian immigrants on the north bank of the Heilongjiang River.
By the time the Treaty of Beijing was signed, Russia had sent a large number of immigrants to the encroached territories. They forcibly took away countless pieces of arable land from the former Qing people and distributed it to Russian immigrants, which stimulated conflicts between local Chinese and Russian immigrants, and disputes over land issues continued to expand.
In order to completely resolve this contradiction, there was a consensus within the Russian government that it was necessary to abolish the Qing government's reserved jurisdiction over the residents of Jiangdong Sixty-Four Tun, and at the same time to ban all the right of residence of the Qing residents in the occupied areas.
Against this background, Russia imposed a compulsory tax on Jiangdong Sixty-four Tun in 1898. The authorities of the Great Qing Dynasty, which still had jurisdiction over the local area, naturally could not sit idly by, so they sent a sentry officer and soldier to go, but as soon as this team crossed the river, it was disarmed by the Russian army.
Seeing that the Chinese military was so incompetent, and the Qing government had no time to worry because of the Boxer Rebellion, Tsar Nicholas II thought that the time had come and decided to use force against the Great Qing State again and take northeast China in one fell swoop.
Tsarist Russia lit the fuse of the Holocaust
In July 1900, on the pretext of protecting the Eastern Railway, Tsarist Russia invaded Tianjin and Beijing as a member of the Eight-Power Alliance, and on the other hand, demanded that China allow Russian troops to enter from the northeast. At this time, there were 50,000 garrisons in northeast China, totaling 117 battalions. Among them, 36 battalions were stationed in Heilong, 52 battalions were stationed in Mukden, and the rest were in Jilin.
Shou Shan, the general of Heilongjiang at the time, was well aware of the ambitions of the Russians, and thought that we had 50,000 horses and were afraid that you would not succeed, so he refused Russia's unreasonable request on the spot. But where did he expect that Russia had already gathered an army of 170,000 and was ready to attack.
The Russian army was proud of its large number of people, and no longer fired mouth cannons, and directly attacked the city of Yaohun. However, Shoushan and his subordinate generals were not vegetarians, and several encounters were fought to suppress the superiority of the Russian army.
After losing the battle line and suffering from the deflated Russian army, the Russian army was unable to dissipate its evil spirit, so on the grounds that there were Chinese in the occupied area to inform the Qing army, they launched an indiscriminate massacre of the Chinese in Hailan Bubble and Jiangdong Sixty-four Tun.
In fact, the Russians did not do this only to vent their anger, but as mentioned earlier, they mainly wanted to solve the problem of the indigenous people of the occupied territories in this way.
Innocent Chinese residents were brutally killed by the Russians
Before the move, the Russian side organized the distribution of weapons to local Russian migrants, and then these people joined forces with the Russian army to carry out four rounds of massacres of the Chinese residents of Hailan Bubble. From this point of view, the local Russians were both soldiers and civilians in this tragedy, participants and perpetrators of the atrocities, so none of the people there were innocent and innocent.
Forced by bayonets and blades, local Chinese were rounded up separately. These compatriots were then either driven into the river and drowned alive, or locked in mansions and burned. Some women with babies in their arms struggled to throw them ashore in order to survive, but the Russians laughed maniacally and picked up the baby with bayonets and threw it back into the river.
For a time, Hailan Bubble and Jiangdong Sixty-four Tunton became a purgatory, wailing and screaming endlessly. The tragic and abnormal scene of the massacre made future generations feel like a knife in their hearts every time they think of it, and they can't bear to look back and praise.
Compared with the massacre of the residents of Hailan Pao, the compatriots of Jiangdong Sixty-four Tun were a little lucky. Shocked to hear that his compatriots had been brutally killed, Fengxiang, the deputy capital of the Qing army, immediately ordered artillery arrays along the river to bombard the Russian positions, and sent troops to the south to guard against Russian reinforcements from Boli.
At the same time, the Qing army crossed the Heilongjiang River in three ways, and after defeating the Russian army, it met at Bordotun. The brave Qing army stranded the Russians' plan for the massacre, and they had to retreat to Hailan Bubble, and the remaining residents of Jiangdong's 64 tun survived.
The Aihun Navy Division also did its best to carry out the rescue, urgently dispatching 30 military ships and 20 merchant ships to form a transport force, and worked day and night to rescue the surviving compatriots to a safe area.
Afterwards, the Chinese side recorded that "the seriously injured were killed on the shore, the lightly injured died in the river, and the uninjured were thrown into the water and drowned, and the bones overflowed, covering the river and ocean." Another description said: "Those who did not cross the river, men and women, old and young, were forced into the river together, and only sixty or seventy people survived in the floating water, and the rest were forced to drown in the river, and those who floated in the river for several days".
According to available data, the number of residents slaughtered in Hailan Pao in the "Gengzi Russian Disaster" was more than 5,000 to 6,000, and the number of victims in Jiangdong Sixty-four Tun reached 7,000 to 8,000. But everyone knows that this data is not accurate, and the actual number of people killed is more than that.
epilogue
Because of the heinous and horrific methods of the Russians in the "Gengzi Russian Disaster", even the later Soviet leader Lenin could not help but recall with emotion: The policy of the tsarist government in China was a criminal policy, they killed and set fires, burned villages, drove ordinary people into the Heilongjiang River and drowned them alive, shot and stabbed unarmed residents and their wives and children to death.
May 28, 1858 was the signing day of the Treaty of Yaohun, a high-profile celebration in Russia and a day of national humiliation in China. "Horseshoe goes south and people look north", we should always be vigilant and remember history.