It is different in the northern province, where a cold climate and vast stretches of forest render agriculture more difficult. If it had not been for the war and its attendant complications, I had purposed to travel through it from Northern Korea. But it is unsettled at all times. The majority of its immigrants consists of convicts, fugitive criminals, soldiers who have left the colors, and gold and ginseng hunters. There is something almost comical about some of the doings of this unpromising community. It comprises large organized bands of mounted brigands, well led and armed, who do not hesitate to come into collision with the Imperial troops, frequently coming off victors, and at times, as when I was in Mukden, wresting forts from their hands. During the Taiping rebellion, when the Chinese troops were withdrawn from Manchuria, these bands carried havoc and terror everywhere, and seizing upon towns and villages, ruled them by right of conquest![28] In recent years the Government has decided to let voluntary colonists settle in the northern provinces, and has even furnished them with material assistance. Still, things are bad, and the brigands have come to be regarded as a necessary evil, and are “arranged with.” They are not scrupulous as to human life, and when they catch a rich merchant from the south, they send an envoy to his guild with a claim for ransom, strengthened by the threat that if it is not forthcoming in so many days, the captive’s head will be cut off. Winter, when the mud is frozen hard, is the only time for the transit of goods by land, and long trains of mule carts may then be seen, a hundred or more together, starting from Newchwang, Mukden, and other southern cities, each carrying a small flag, which denotes that a suitable blackmail has been paid to an agent of the brigand chiefs, and that they will not be robbed on the journey! Later, when I was on the Siberian frontier of Manchuria, the brigands were in great force, and having been joined by half-starved deserters from the Chinese army, were harrying the country, and the peasants were flying in terror from their farms. Among the curious features of Manchurian brigandage, is that its virulence rises or falls with good or bad harvests, inundations, etc. For many of the usually respectable peasant farmers, in times of floods and scanty crops, join the robber bands, returning to their honest avocations the next season! In spite, however, of this terrorism in the northeast, Manchuria is one of the most prosperous of the Chinese viceroyalties, and its foreign trade is assuming annually increasing importance.[29]