Resources
Matveev, Nikolai Petrovich . Brief historical outline of the city of Vladivostok (in Russian). Vladivostok.
Sorokina, T. N. "Chinese quarters of the Far Eastern cities (late 19th–early 20th century)]. Diasporas: 2–3.
Миллионка (Chinese: Million Street) is the old Chinese quarter of Vladivostok, Russia, located north of the city's railway station and adjacent to the port of Vladivostok, with a dense three-story building and crowded streets, once known as Vladivostok's Chinatown.
At its peak, Миллионка housed up to 50,000 Chinese residents until 1936, when the Soviet Union demanded that the neighborhood be cleared.
Today, as the city's main cultural heritage, it is being transformed into the center of fashion and café life in the city of Vladivostok (photo below).
Before the Russian colonization of the Far East, the Chinese established themselves in Vladivostok until 1860, when the land was ceded to Russia.
In 1860, Tsarist soldiers established the first Russian settlement there, which soon grew into an important city in the Far East with a large Chinese population.
In 1884, the number of Chinese in Vladivostok reached 3,909. The city council developed a plan to "relocate" Chinese and North Koreans to specialized settlements.
The plan was approved by the Governor of Primorsky Krai, but the majority of the Chinese refused to comply with the relocation order.
At that time, the Vladivostok police did not even know anything about the number of Chinese. It is estimated that the number of Chinese in Vladivostok reached 4,000 to 5,000 at that time, of which 6,000 were seasonal arrivals. "Where they came from, where they wanted to go, why they went, no one knows, and the numbers are hearsay. ”
In 1897, as the number of Chinese in Vladivostok reached 5,580, the Chinese gathered in Semenovsky Kovsh, where there was a Chinese market called Semenovskii Bazaar.
Houses rented to Chinese were built in the late 1890s by Russian landlords or Chinese businessmen who leased land. From then on, an unofficial Chinese community soon formed on the east side of the Chinese market.
The Chinese neighborhood "grew with the city", and in early 1893, Chinese immigrants increased at a rate of 10,000-11,000 per year.
By the end of the 1910s, there were more than 50,000 Chinese living here, one-third of whom were unregistered illegal immigrants, and more than 40,000 had no permanent address, many of them from Manchuria and Shandong in China (Qing Dynasty).
From the late 1890s to the early 1920s, half of the population of Vladivostok was Asian, with the Chinese being the largest Asian group.
83.3% of the Chinese are male, in stark contrast to Koreans and Japanese, who are roughly gender-balanced in the city.
Many Chinese live there for short periods of time just for seasonal work.
At that time, Vladivostok's economy was heavily dependent on the services provided by nearby Chinese merchants. Specifically, retail in Vladivostok at that time was controlled by the Chinese, who owned more retail stores than the Russians.
According to official records, the entire Chinese neighborhood is extremely crowded, poorly ventilated, and has poor hygiene, which often leads the local health department to denounce the situation in downtown Chinatown.
For example, on Semenovskaia Street, Building 5 alone has 59 apartments with 300 to 350 residents, while the actual number of occupants may be several times the official figure.
After an outbreak of an infectious disease in 1890, the local government described the "extremely crowded and unbelievable state of hygiene" in the Chinese quarter, which was seen as a threat to public health: "Thousands of exhausted, ragged, and unhygienic Chinese poured into Vladivostok...... and occupied all trade and occupation ......"
Although the local Russian government often tried to expel the Chinese from the city and restrict their activities, these attempts were futile because the Chinese were still outside the official jurisdiction of the city.
After the Bolsheviks took over Vladivostok in 1922, the new government considered the Chinese to be "harmful foreigners." In 1929, the Soviet government banned free commercial enterprise, and many Chinese left the city.
Soviet officials often described the neighborhood as a center of drug opium trafficking, deeming the area unsanitary, dangerous, and a huge fire hazard, and then used this as an excuse to evict the Chinese residents.
Resources
Matveev, Nikolai Petrovich . Brief historical outline of the city of Vladivostok (in Russian). Vladivostok.
Sorokina, T. N. "Chinese quarters of the Far Eastern cities (late 19th–early 20th century)]. Diasporas: 2–3.
#Let's do some dry goods# #History# #Historical trivia# #Historical review# #Geography# #Humanities# #Russia# #Qing Dynasty# #Northeast# #Heilongjiang# #山东#