The Tinderbox of the Amur Borderlands

The banks of the Amur River (known as Heilongjiang in Chinese) had long been a contested frontier between the Russian and Qing empires. The 1858 Treaty of Aigun nominally settled territorial disputes, creating an uneasy arrangement where Russian-controlled Blagoveshchensk (Chinese: Hailanpao) faced Qing-administered Heihe across the river. By 1900, Blagoveshchensk—capital of Russia’s Amur Oblast—had 20,000 residents, including several thousand Chinese merchants and laborers.

More volatile was the situation just east of the city in the “Sixty-Four Villages East of the River” (江东六十四屯), a Qing enclave permitted under the treaty. Home to 35,000 Chinese farmers, this fertile strip became a flashpoint when the Boxer Rebellion erupted in 1900. As anti-foreign sentiment swept China, Russian authorities grew paranoid about the loyalties of these borderland communities.

The Spark: Clashes Along the Amur

Tensions escalated in July 1900 when Qing forces under General Shoushan—a staunch anti-Russian commander—began mobilizing troops. On July 14, Russian supply ships navigating the Amur came under artillery fire from Aigun’s Qing garrison. The next evening, Qing batteries launched a three-hour bombardment of Blagoveshchensk itself, marking the war’s formal outbreak.

Panic gripped the Russian city. Rumors spread of an imminent Qing amphibious assault, while Chinese residents—many displaying Boxer slogans like “Destroy the Foreigners”—began fleeing across the river. Eyewitness Lev Deich, a former revolutionary exiled to Blagoveshchensk, described scenes of hysteria: “Indescribable terror seized the town… peaceful Chinese were subjected to brutal violence by people who had completely lost human feelings.”

The July 17 Massacre: Anatomy of a Atrocity

What followed was a meticulously documented horror. On July 16, Blagoveshchensk’s police chief proposed expelling all Chinese from the city. Military Governor Konstantin Gribsky approved the order, and over 3,500 Chinese—including women and children—were rounded up at swordpoint and marched to the riverbank near the village of Verkhne-Blagoveshchensk.

Contemporary investigative records reveal the chilling details:
– Prisoners were forced into the Amur’s 4.5-meter-deep currents without boats
– Cossacks opened fire when victims hesitated, while civilians joined the slaughter
– Axe-wielding conscripts hacked survivors attempting to swim
– Only ~100 of the first group survived the crossing

Over four days, similar “expulsions” claimed thousands of lives. Deich later described the Amur as “a mirror-like surface crowded with countless corpses.” The massacre extended to the Sixty-Four Villages, where Russian troops systematically burned settlements and drove remaining inhabitants into the wilderness.

Imperial Reactions and Global Outrage

Governor Gribsky’s August proclamation boasted of teaching the Qing “a terrible lesson,” while falsely claiming the drownings were unauthorized. The truth emerged through dissident networks—Deich’s accounts reached German and Russian socialist newspapers, sparking international condemnation. In Japan, the atrocity fueled anti-Russian sentiment, inspiring protest songs like “The Bloody Amur.”

Meanwhile, Russian forces under General Rennenkampf completed the conquest of Manchuria, seizing Qiqihar (where General Shoushan committed suicide) and Shenyang by October 1900. The campaign left 173,000 Russian troops occupying northeast China.

The Geopolitical Fallout

The crisis exposed fractures in St. Petersburg. War Minister Alexei Kuropatkin advocated permanent annexation, while Finance Minister Sergei Witte warned against overextension. Foreign Minister Vladimir Lamsdorf—a cautious bureaucrat—struggled to restrain the military. Though Russia eventually pledged to withdraw (a promise later broken), the massacre poisoned Sino-Russian relations for decades.

Legacy: Memory and Denial

Unlike contemporaneous Boxer Rebellion atrocities, the Blagoveshchensk massacre remains obscure outside specialist circles. In Russia, Soviet historians downplayed tsarist crimes, while post-1991 narratives emphasize Qing provocations. Chinese commemorations focus on the Sixty-Four Villages’ destruction as part of the “Century of Humiliation.” The Amur’s waters, once choked with bodies, now flow silently past modern border cities—their shared history of violence submerged beneath economic cooperation and selective remembrance.

The events of 1900 underscore how frontier zones become laboratories for extreme violence when imperial ambitions collide with ethnic suspicion. As Deich observed, the massacre revealed how quickly “peaceful residents could transform into beasts”—a warning echoing across generations of borderland conflicts.