Towards the end of 1896, in return for the great services which she considered she had rendered to China in the war between that country and Japan, Russia obtained the concession for a railway which, starting from Chita, Trans-Baikalia, about 200 miles west of Strietensk, would pass through Manchuria to Vladivostok, avoiding the great bend of the Amur, though still offering the disadvantage that one important section of the through route would not be on Russian territory. Under a contract made between the Chinese Government and the Russo-Chinese Bank, a _Chinese Eastern Railway Company_ was formed to build and operate the line thus conceded; but the arrangements made were carried out through the Russian Minister of Finance, and the line was directly dependent on the Russian State. Russia's occupation of Port Arthur in March, 1898, led, in the spring of the following year, to the further construction being begun of a southern branch of the Chinese Eastern Railway from Harbin, a station on the Chita-Vladivostok line, to the extremity of the Liao-tung peninsula. It was these two railways, the Trans-Siberian and the Chinese Eastern, terminating at Vladivostok in the one direction and at Port Arthur in the other, which came into special consideration in the war of 1904-5. It was on the Trans-Siberian line, more especially, that Russia was mainly dependent (as the German official report on the war points out) not only for the concentration and maintenance of her army but even for the raising and organisation of most of its units. When the Trans-Siberian was first built, the desire to avoid undue expenditure on a line which must necessarily involve a huge expenditure, with little or no prospect of yielding a return sufficient for the payment of interest thereon, led to the adoption of an economy which was to hamper very materially the transport capacity of the railway. Only a single line of rails was allowed for; a limit was placed on the breadth of the embankments; the curves were greater than considerations of speed and safety should have permitted; the gradients were either dangerously varied or so excessive that divisions of the trains were necessary; the rails used were of no greater weight than from 42 lbs. to 47 lbs. per yard, and they were badly laid, even then; the bridges across the smaller streams were made of wood only; the crossing-places and the railway stations were few and far between, while all the secondary constructions were provided on what was almost the cheapest possible scale.