A few days later I went to Hun-chun on the frontier of Chinese Manchuria, from its position an important military post, and was most hospitably received by the Commandant and his married _aide-de-camp_. There, as everywhere in Primorsk, and from the civil as well as the military authorities, I not only received the utmost kindness, courtesy, and hospitality, but information was frankly given on the various topics I was interested in, and help towards the attainment of my objects. Hun-chun is in the midst of mountainous country, denuded of wood in recent years, and abounding in rich, well-watered valleys inhabited only by Koreans. A wilder, drearier, and more wind-swept situation it would be hard to find. Instead of “4,000 troops” there were only 200 Cossacks, housed in a good brick barrack, one half of which is a much decorated chapel, besides which there are only open thatched sheds for their hardy, active Baikal horses, a small, well-arranged hospital, a wooden house for the Colonel Commandant, and some terra-cotta mud-houses for the officers and married troopers. The whole Russian military force from Hun-chun to the Amur consisted of 1,500 Cossacks, distributed among thirty frontier posts. The Commandant told me that their chief duty at that time was the “daily” arresting of Chinese brigands who crossed the frontier to harry the Korean villages, and who, on being marched back and handed over to the mandarins, were at once liberated to repeat their forays. The Chinese had “massed” several thousand of their Manchu troops at Hun-chun, and they had created such a reign of terror that the peasant farmers had deserted their homes over a large area of country. The soldiers, robbed by their officers of their nominal pay, and only half fed, relied on unlimited pillage for making up the deficiency, and neither women nor property were safe from their brutality and violence. So desperately undisciplined were they that only a few days before the Secretary and Interpreter of the Russian frontier Commissioner at Nowo Kiewsk, visiting Hun-chun on official business, narrowly escaped actual violence at their hands, and the Chinese Governor told them that he had no control at all over the troops. It was only the rigid discipline of the Cossacks which prevented scrimmages which might have produced a serious conflagration. [Illustration: KOREAN SETTLERS’ HOUSE.] CHAPTER XX THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILROAD