but 6,000 miles were projected, and engineers were surveying
rights of way through whole provinces. Much of the completed
work was undone during the destructive madness of the
Boxer uprising, but reconstruction began as soon as the tumult
was quelled. According to the Archiv fur Eisenbahnwesen of
Germany, the total length of the railways in use in 1903 in
China was 1,236 kilometers or about 742 miles.

Several foreign nations have taken an aggressive part in this
movement. In the north, Russia, not satisfied with a terminus
at cold Vladivostok where ice closes the harbour nearly half
the year, steadily demanded concessions which would enable
her Trans-Siberian Railway to reach an ice-free winter port,
and thus give her a commanding position in the Pacific and a
channel through which the trade of northern Asia might reach
and enrich Russia's vast possessions in Siberia and Europe.
So Russian diplomacy rested not till it had secured the right to
extend the Trans-Siberian Railway southward from Sungari
through Manchuria to Tachi-chao near Mukden. From there
one branch runs southward to Port Arthur and Dalny and
another southwestward to Shan-hai Kwan, where the great
Wall of China touches the sea. As connection is made at that
point with the Imperial Railway to Taku, Tien-tsin and Peking,
Moscow 5,746 miles away, is brought within seventeen days of
Peking. Thus, Russian influence had an almost unrestricted
entrance to China on the North, while a third branch from
Mukden to Wiju, on the Korean frontier, will connect with a
projected line running from that point southward to Seoul, the
capital of Korea. A St. Petersburg dispatch, dated November
26, 1903, states that a survey has just been completed from