During several successive days the bodies of the murdered Chinese went floating down the Amur in such masses as made counting them difficult, and covering a considerable expanse of the river. Yet at first no mention was made of this in the two local newspapers, nor was there any allusion to the fate of the Chinese inhabitants of the town. Only on the fourth or fifth day after the holocaust did an article appear in _The Amur Province_, expressing indignation at the cruel and gruesome affair. This article was copied in Petersburg journals, and thus the civilised world for the first time learned how these thousands of helpless people had been done to death. The other organ of Blagovèstshensk, _The Amur Gazette_, confined itself to the meagre announcement that “the Chinese residing on Russian territory had been sent away, a suggestion having been made to them that they should cross to the other side of the river.” Grodekov, the governor-general of the province, informed the authorities in Petersburg that “the Chinese throw their dead and wounded into the river, and forty such corpses have been counted.” Thus is history written! With much the same amount of veracity various officials sent reports of the hostilities between the Russians and the Chinese. They told of battles that had never taken place, of countless Chinese hosts, which they pretended had been annihilated, when in reality only women and children had been seen, and so forth. In the Amur province, for example, much amusement was caused by the report sent from Colonel Kanonovitch stating that in the so-called “Pyàtaia Pad” he had overcome an immense army of Chinese, for which exploit he received a decoration. It soon transpired that in the place mentioned Kanonovitch had only encountered two Japanese women!