Splendidly situated at the head of a peninsula about twelve miles long, separating two deep bays, whose shores, however, are absolutely sterile, Vladivostok faces the principal and the more eastern of the two ports, which happens, also, to be the safest. The town contains a number of stone houses several stories high, built on the rather steep sides of the hills, and presents quite an imposing appearance, especially after the little wooden-housed towns in the interior of Siberia. Although it lacks the extraordinary animation of its contemporaries, Vancouver, Tacoma, and Seattle, for instance, on the other side of the Pacific, its streets are the liveliest I have seen between Moscow and Nagasaki. It soon becomes evident that one is in the Far East here. The streets are crowded with pigtailed Chinese in blue, with Koreans in white, and Japanese in their national costumes. Among these Asiatics move soldiers and sailors, so that the European civilian costume is scarcely represented at all, and the majority of those who do wear it are Japanese. The day after my arrival happened to be the feast of St. Alexander Nevsky, one of the great Russian holidays, which coincided with a Chinese festival, so that the whole place was a blaze of Celestial bunting, gold-edged yellow triangular shaped flags, emblazoned with heraldic dragons, far out-numbering those of the Russians. Figures confirm the impressions of experience, and the following show the manner in which the population of Vladivostok was subdivided in 1895: ──────────────────────────────────────────────────┬──────┬──────┬────── │ Men. │Women.│Total. ──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼──────┼──────┼────── Nobles │ 290│ 228│ 518 Priests and their families │ 19│ 18│ 37 Russian civil population │ 1,691│ 1,089│ 2,780 Soldiers and families │ 9,232│ 855│10,087 Exiles and families │ 117│ 72│ 189 Other Europeans │ 46│ 26│ 72 Japanese │ 676│ 556│ 1,232 Chinese │ 5,580│ 58│ 5,638 Koreans │ 642│ 177│ 819 ──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼──────┼──────┼────── Total │18,293│ 3,079│21,372 ──────────────────────────────────────────────────┴──────┴──────┴────── In 1895 the population had considerably increased, mainly in consequence of the barracks and of the increase of Russian and Asiatic emigration. It has been observed that since the Chino-Japanese War the Koreans have developed a distinct tendency to establish themselves on Russian soil.