The Chinese shops, which are a feature of Wladivostok, undersell both Russians and Germans, and have an increasing trade. Kuntz and Albers, a Hamburg firm of importers, bankers, shipping agents, and Whiteleyism in general, with sixty clerks, mostly German, with a few Russians, Danes, and Koreans, conduct an enormous wholesale and retail business in a “palatial” pile of brick and stone buildings, and has sixteen branch houses in Eastern Siberia, and the German firm of Langalutje runs them very closely. The railway station and offices are solid and handsome; an admirably built railroad, open to the Ussuri Bridge, 186 miles, and progressing towards the Amur with great rapidity, points to a new commercial future; streets of shops and dwelling-houses, in which brick and stone are fast replacing wood, are extending to the north, east, and west, and along the Gulf of Peter the Great, for fully three miles; and new and handsome official and private edifices of much pretension were being rapidly completed. One broad road, with houses sometimes on one, sometimes on both sides, running along the hillside for 2 miles at a considerable height, is the “Main Street” or “High Street” of Wladivostok. Along it are built most of the public buildings, and the great shops and mercantile offices. It is crossed by painfully steep roads climbing up the hill and descending with equal steepness to the sea. There are two or three parallel roads of small importance. The builder was at work in all quarters, and the clink of the mason’s trowel and the ring of the carpenter’s hammer were only silent for a few hours during the night. Several of Government buildings were barely finished, and were occupied before they were painted and stuccoed. Building up and pulling down were going on simultaneously. Roads were being graded, culverts and retaining walls built, and wooden houses showed signs of disappearing from the principal thoroughfare. There was a “boom” in real property. The value of land has risen fabulously. “Lots” which were bought in 1864 for 600 and 3,000 roubles are now worth 12,000 and 20,000, and in the centre of the town land is not to be bought at any price.