[Illustration: MAP OF THE AREA AFFECTED BY THE WAR.] [Sidenote: The Russo-Chinese Bank] The first result of M. Pavloff's policy of disinterested friendship became manifest in 1896, when the Chinese Government concluded an agreement with the Russo-Chinese Bank, providing for the formation of a company to be styled the Eastern Chinese Railway Company, the ownership of which was to be vested solely in Russian and Chinese subjects and which was to construct and work a railway within the confines of China, from one of the points on the western borders of the province of Heh-Lung-Kiang to one of the points on the eastern borders of the province of Kirin; and to the connection of this railway with those branches which the Imperial Russian Government would construct to the Chinese frontier from Trans-Baikalia and the Southern Ussuri lines. The institution, which went by the plain, solid, commercial name of the Russo-Chinese Bank, was, of course, merely a sort of Far Eastern annex of the Finance Bureau of M. de Witte, and the line thus modestly announced was the nucleus of the great railway which has since played such a large part in consolidating the Russian dominion over Manchuria. At the outset it was pretended that the line was to be merely a short cut to Vladivostock, but the true ambitions at the bottom of the scheme became apparent when Russian engineers began to pour into the country followed by squadrons of Cossacks, nominally for the protection of the new railway, but really in pursuance of Russia's invariable policy of impressing the natives with a due sense of her enormous military strength. [Sidenote: The Mailed Fist]