The Russians built the [M 003 / East Chinese Railway] as a shortcut to [V 011 / Vladivostok] and as a means of exploiting the rich economic and strategic prize of Manchuria to the exclusion of Japan and the Western powers. They paid a [L3 306 / high price] for what turned out to be a negligible return - having to contend with deserts and mountain ranges, arctic cold, rampaging floods, pestilence, bandits and saboteurs almost simultaneously.
The chief engineer, Yugovich, arrived in Vladivostok in April 1897 lacking detailed knowledge of Manchuria's topograhical and climatic peculiarities. Surveying parties returned with discouraging reports. The few roads were fantastically rough during the rainy season and impassable quagmires until filled in with brush and logs. Supply carts could only cross unbridged rivers and streams at random fords or on pairs of boats lashed together. Fourteen major waterways required spans of 800-feet to a half-mile.
Parts of the eastern section had wood but no stone; the western had stone but no wood. Along the entire 927 miles of the route there were less than six towns with little utilizable labor. For these reasons a makeshift line was built to transport materials, Russian artisans, and legions of Chinese laborers to eventually construct a durable single-track railway of broad Russian gauge.
The first wave of laborers began to work westward from the Ussuri River in August 1897. Others went by rail and water from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk then up the Amur and the Sungari rivers to Harbin. There, they tracked east to meet construction parties from the Ussuri and west toward Manchuria station. In 1898, with Dairen and Port Arthur leased to Russia, the South Manchurian extension was begun through the most densely populated section of the country, a tremendous market for Russian exporters.
On November 3, 1901, the entire Chinese Eastern opened to provisional traffic. Yugovich set about to make improvements and finish the assembly of more than 600 permanent bridges. However, the most arduous task was to bore a tunnel more than 10,000 feet long in the wind-swept Greater Khingan Range.
Beginning in the summer of 1902, construction suffered a severe setback. An epidemic of Asiatic cholera, which had enveloped a huge area from Shanghai to Tientsin, entered Manchuria with a sumultaneous outbreak of bubonic plague. Practically all of the best working season in the afflicted districts was lost so that completion of the permanent way that summer was impossible. Only in February 1903 -two years behind schedule - was the East Chinese ready for regular traffic. It cost more than the entire Trans-Siberian main line. However, the government was jockeying for Russian hegemony in China, a policy that soon resulted in war with Japan.
