Meantime another conflict of interests between Russia and Japan was developing and contributing to the same result—namely, the Russo-Japanese war. This was the so-called “Manchurian Question.” It is not necessary for the purposes of our narrative to trace with any detail the origin and different stages of that succession of successful intrigues and encroachments upon foreign territory which had been for some time carried on with the Chinese by methods similar to those now being employed in Korea. Some of the more salient points in the history of the preceding period of nearly a half-century need, however, to be called to mind. In 1860, when the allied forces occupied Peking, the Russian Minister, General Ignatieff, by a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, secured for his country the cession of the maritime province of Manchuria, with 600 miles of coast, and the harbor of Vladivostok, down to the mouth of the Tumen. For this he gave nothing in return beyond the pretence that it was in his power to bring pressure upon the allies and thus secure their more speedy evacuation of the Chinese capital. Thirty years later, after the new province had been developed and the harbor of Vladivostok converted into a powerful fortress, Russia determined upon building an all-rail route across Siberia, and immediately began to press for other concessions in Chinese territory that in 1897 resulted in the association which constructed what is now known as the Manchurian Railway. This enterprise was ostensibly a joint affair of the two countries; but it has been fitly described as “only a convenient bonnet” for an essentially Russian undertaking. Russian engineers now came in large numbers to Manchuria; Russian Cossacks accompanied them for purposes of their protection. Later in the same year the seizure by Germany of Kiao-chau, in satisfaction for outrages committed upon German missionaries, was followed by Russia’s request to the Chinese Government for permission to winter her fleet at Port Arthur. In March of the next year Japan had the added mortification, bitterness, and cause for alarm, of seeing Russia demand and obtain from China a formal lease of the same commercial and strategic points of the peninsula of Liao-tung of which Russia, by combining with Germany and France, had deprived Japan when she had won them by conquest in war. These enterprises in Manchuria were financed by the Russo-Chinese Bank, an institution which had recently been founded in the Far East as a branch of the Russian Ministry of Finance. So important is this last-mentioned fact that one writer places upon M. Pokotiloff, Chief of the Russo-Chinese Bank in Berlin, the responsibility for the whole Port Arthur episode, and declares it was he who dictated the policy of Russia in Manchuria after the Boxer uprising.[24]