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It is hardy in many English situations, but does not fruit freely, although the orange-blossom-like flowers are produced very abundantly. A pretty little glossy-leaved shrub that is well worthy of attention, particularly where a cosy corner can be put aside for its cultivation. CLADRASTIS AMURENSIS. Amoor Yellow Wood. Amur, 1880.
As the protector of Chinese interests Russia was in position to ask a favor; she asked and obtained permission to carry the Siberian railway in a straight line through Manchuria, instead of following the Amur in its great northward sweep. The Japanese word for statesman also means chess-player. Russian diplomatists had played their game well.
And violating all the traditions of history, the flight of the Russian Eagle from that moment was toward the rising, not the setting sun. Muraviev, now Governor of the Eastern Provinces of Siberia, was empowered to negotiate a treaty with China to determine the rights of the two nations upon the river Amur, which separated Manchuria, the northernmost province of China, from Russian Siberia.
I have come a thousand versts down the Amur already, and have seen a million gorgeous landscapes; I feel giddy with ecstasy.... It's marvellous scenery, and how hot! What warm nights! There is a mist in the mornings but it is warm. I look through an opera-glass at the shore and see a prodigious number of ducks, geese, grebes, herons and all sorts of creatures with long beaks.
A force was sent out from Yakutz, on the Lena, in 1643, which reached the Amur, and thus Russians came for the first time in contact with the Chinese, and a new method of reaching Cathay was thus obtained, while geography gained the knowledge of the extent of Northern Asia. It was not, however, till fifty years afterwards, in 1696, that the Russians reached Kamtschatka.
Switzerland and France have never known such freedom. The lowest convict breathes more freely on the Amur than the highest general in Russia. If you lived here, you would write a great deal of good stuff and delight the public, but I am not equal to it. One begins to meet Chinamen at Irkutsk, and here they are common as flies. They are the most good-natured people.
This railway had to be carried along the northern bank of the Amur where engineering and economic difficulties abound. Moreover, the river makes a huge semicircular sweep northward, and a railway following its northern bank to Vladivostok must make the same detour.
At a point beyond Lake Baikal the river Amur makes a sudden detour, sweeping far toward the north before it again descends, thus enclosing a large bit of Manchuria in a form not unlike the State of Michigan. Many miles of the projected road might be saved by crossing the diameter of this semi-circle and moving in a straight line to Vladivostok, across Chinese territory.
It was not yet decided whether we should continue our voyage to the Amur River, or remain in Petropavlovsk and begin our northern journey from there, so we still regarded the brig as our home and returned, every night to our little cabin.
Every man of them wishes to know whether there is a fortune in a collection of old porcelain or merely a competence, and whether it is true that a long robe of Amur River sables, when the furs are perfect and undyed, fetch so many hundreds of pounds on the London market.
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