This paper presents accounts of seven travelogues, written by Hungarian travellers and professionals who visited or worked in Manchuria between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. So far these texts have not received wide scholarly attention because they are accessible only in Hungarian, although they con-tain unique first-hand observations of the construction of the Eastern Chinese Railway and many ethnographic notes. The author suggests that some narratives, especially those written by Hungarians who worked as engineering specialists, present very bal-anced analysis of the situation, because they belonged neither to the colonising project in China, nor to the colonised side, but rather were enthusiasts of technologi-cal modernisation. As a theoretical frame, the author attempts to apply notions and concepts developed by infrastructural and cybernetic anthropology.
Keywords
Hungarian travelogues – Manchuria – Eastern Chinese Railway – construction and breakdowns – infrastructural and cybernetic anthropology
* The author would like to thank Tatiana Safonova, Sayana Namsaraeva and Caroline Humphrey and the anonymous referee of Inner Asia; their influence on this article is substantial.
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Introduction
This article is based on travel accounts left by seven Hungarian travellers who visited Manchuria between 1877 and 1931. Professor of Geology and member of the Hungarian research expedition Lajos Lóczy was the first one, who spent around 14 months in China in 1877–78. Although he did not reach Manchuria (his closest point was the southern part of the Gobi desert), he provided a detailed description of Manchuria based on information collected during his trip. Another traveller, Jenő Cholnoky, a professor of Geography, was hired as an inspector at a French mining company and spent more than three months in Manchuria in 1898, visiting silver and gold mines there. The third, an aristo-crat, Count Jenő Zichy, made several extensive trips in Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and Beijing around 1900. The next travelogue was written by Benedek Baráthosi Balog, who was a secondary school director. His travel route included Vladivostok and places along the Amur River, where he visited some local indigenous groups between 1904 and 1918. Another traveller, Professor Lajos Ligeti, was a specialist in Inner Asian linguistics and spent almost three years between 1928 and 1931 in Inner Mongolia and Northern Manchuria, visiting lamaseries and courts of the Mongol nobles (taiji). It is interesting that the Hungarian state supported his trip to study languages and to collect Mongol and Tibetan texts and manuscripts.
The last two travelogues, which are very distinct from the others, were com-posed by technical specialists—an architect and electricity engineer, József Geleta, and a railway engineer, Károly Gubányi. The story of József Geleta is especially interesting, since his travel in Inner Asia happened against his will. As a First World War prisoner, he was exiled by the Russians to south Siberia, from where he escaped through Uriangkhai (Tuva) to Mongolia in 1919. He had an extraordinary carreer during his nine years in Mongolia: Geleta built a power station in Urga, designed several public buildings including the House of Parliament, was employed as a lecturer at Urga University, and even became an adviser to the Mongolian government. Engineer Károly Gubányi worked at different construction sites along the Eastern Chinese Railway from 1898 to 1903, and left the most vivid discriptions of the railway construction process with its recurrent breakdowns, epidemics, physical exhaustion and starvation of the workers, lack of professional expertise, and so on. His accounts became the primary source for my article.
As a theoretical framework, I use concepts recently developed by infra-structural and cybernetic anthropology and try to view the historical contribu-tion of my authors through these approaches. Anthropologists use the term
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‘infrastructure’ to designate built networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people and finance are trafficked. For example, Larkin writes about infrastructure as containing built things, knowledge things and people things. Infrastructure can be also viewed as an amalgam of technical, administra-tive and financial techniques (Larkin 2013). In this article, I also try to frame analytical interpretation of the historical materials in line with new research approaches of cybernetic systems (Kockelman 2010;1 Helmreich 2009; Battaglia 2012; Fisch 2013). Since the steam engine was one of the first machines that operated on the basis of a feedback loop, the locomotive can be seen as a cen-tral model for the ‘machine’ metaphor in the cybernetic approach. So, I think, it is a reasonable choice to use the cybernetic approach (as an analytic lan-guage) to provide a new interpretation of the railway systems in Manchuria.
The distinction between infrastructures and their environments are arbi-trary and can only be experienced through contrasting softness and hardness, the feeling of being hot or cold, sounds, noise2 and other sensory situations (Larkin 2013; Feld 2012/1982). Hungarian travellers and engineers sensitively described the special relationships between emotional and sensory experi-ences (softness, cold, brightness) and particular local environments. I grouped their descriptions in a time frame before and during the railway, also highlight-ing certain topics to which these travelogues drew special attention.
Manchuria and Mongolia on the Eve of the Railway Construction
EnvironmentHungarian travellers tended to see Manchuria as an empty place (Baráthosi 1930a: 139) on the periphery of the Chinese Empire (Lóczy 1886), inhabited by fishermen or hunters for skins and fur (Lóczy 1886: 620). In their view, Manchuria was rich in mineral resources, such as gold, silver and coal (Cholnoky 1900: table 78, 171, 160, 187), which attracted many migrants from Russia and China, but a significant number of the migrants were from a criminal back-ground. They were deported or escaped to Manchuria, not only from China (Baráthosi 1930a: 139), but also from the Russian Empire (Cholnoky 1900: 182).3
1 Kockelman introduced an information and semiotic approach in anthropology, which pro-vides accurate analytical language to study various infrastructures.
2 Michel Serres, a French philosopher, introduced the notion of noise. Noise, for Serres, is a constitutive part of an information channel and an inevitable parasite, without which no message could be sent (Serres 2007 [1981]).
3 See contribution to this issue by Tatyana Sorokina.
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Hungarians have noted that half of the population were soldiers and military personnel both of China and Russia (Cholnoky 1900: 149; Baráthosi 1930a: 32; Ligeti 1934: 291, 299), and the concentration of the Russian Cossacks rose with proximity to Russia (Lóczy 1886: 634–5). Even within the Russian borderland, people in military uniform predominated over civilians (Baráthosi 1930a: 15). Interestingly enough, Hungarians were often suspected by Chinese and Russian army men of being spies, because Hungarians carried with them tools associated with modern technology and intelligence, such as photo cameras and instruments for map-making (Cholnoky 1900: 224; Baráthosi 1930a: 31).
RiversPeoples of colonial peripheries used rivers as a traditional means of transpor-tation and communication; however, travel was irregular and depended on the seasons. For example, spring floods blocked communication for long periods, and there were no damns or irrigation systems that could prevent seasonal ruptures (Zichy 1905: 184–5). In summer, local people travelled using kayaks and smaller boats, while in winter they moved from one place to the other using skis or sledge on the frozen surface of the rivers. Sometimes such trips took weeks and could cover more than 1000 kilometres (Baráthosi 1930a: 28). Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, regular steamboats began to run along the large Siberian rivers: the Angara, the Selenga and the Amur. Lake Hanka in Manchuria also had steamboats (Lóczy 1886: 617). In terms of time, the journey from Irkutsk along the Angara river to Lake Baikal took 26 hours. Many traders travelled from Siberia to Mongolia partly by the Selenga river: they started their journey in Verhne-Udinsk [the historical name for Ulan-Ude] and arrived in Ust-Kiakhta, the last point of navigation near the Kiakhta land border post. There people crossed the border to go to Maimacheng on the Mongolian side of the border. Because steamboats were heated by wood, Hungarians saw this as the main cause of deforestation in the region (Zichy 1905: 217–18; Baráthosi 1930b: 19–22).
TravelHungarian travellers noticed that people’s movements and roads in frontier regions were heavily controlled by the Russian and Chinese authorities. Arrival and departure of foreigners was allowed only by permission of local authorities; passports and travel documents needed to be checked and stamped (Baráthosi 1930a: 139, 150; Cholnoky 1900: 248–9; Forbáth/Geleta 1936: 32–3). In many cases, permission to travel in China and Mongolia depended on the goodwill of local authorities: Mongol nobles or Chinese mandarins (Ligeti 1934).
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Telegraph WiresThese travelogues have particularly interesting observations as to how remote places in Inner Asia became connected through new communication technol-ogies. Mongolia, starting from the end of the nineteenth century, had a rather complex telegraph system operated by Chinese, Danish and Russian compa-nies. This also stimulated development of the banking system, since traders could make money transactions by telegraph while they were in the country-side. A cable under the sea linked Sakhalin island with the continent (Baráthosi 1930a: 113; Galambos 2008). The next important event in the history of the region’s modernisation occurred in 1918, when the Chinese built a radio station in Urga. József Geleta took part in repairing telegraph lines and providing elec-tricity in Urga. He built a local public power station, although not the first one. Bogdo Gegen, the theocratic ruler of Mongolia, already had his own private electric plant to generate electricity to heat and illuminate his palace in Urga. Later, telephone lines went along the old telegraph lines and connected central settlements with distant mining places. (Forbáth/Geleta 1936: 148–50, 116, 189–90, 151, 208–209, 261)
The Trans-Siberian RailwayWe learn from these narratives that certain parts of the railway were already in use, starting from 1900. A regular railway connection existed only between St Petersburg and Irkutsk, while rail construction between Lake Baikal and Vladivostok faced many difficulties (Zichy 1905: 184–5; Baráthosi 1930a: 11). The half-finished railway was difficult to maintain, needing frequent repair because of the rocky landscape and the muddy ground in summer. Hungarian sources also suggested that construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s extension through Manchuria was more of political importance for Russia than because of economic need. Jenő Zichy and Cholnoky forecast the prospect that, when the Manchurian railway was in operation along its entire length, Mongolia, Manchuria and all the northern part of China would have been under control of the Russian Empire (Cholnoky 1898: 98; Zichy 1900: 188). Nevertheless, the sources suggest that Chinese authorities in Manchuria supported the con-struction projects, since they saw it as a financially profitable enterprise for them (Cholnoky 1898: 98). József Geleta also mentioned the regional impor-tance of the railway for Mongolia, as the Mongol government organised air flights to connect to the main stations along the Siberian Railway (Forbáth/Geleta 1936: 190–1).
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TroublesHungarians reported instances when indigenous populations cut telegraph cables or damaged the rails as acts against colonial aspiration and protests against unequal treatment. For example, József Geleta mentioned how Soyots in Uriangkhai (Tuva) frequently broke communication systems by destroying telegraph poles and stealing wires, burning bridges or Cossack settlements in the region (Forbáth/Geleta 1936: 1–2). Jenő Zichy wrote that Chinese have been discriminated against as regards use of the railway; they were allowed to use only open wagons, while comfortable covered wagons were reserved only for Westerners (Zichy 1900: 278–9).
Hungarian Sources on Construction of the Eastern Chinese Railway
In this part of the article, I will investigate the narrators’ perspectives accord-ing to the following three topics, which in certain ways reflect elements4 of the railway system:
1. Relations between construction and railway through observations of the people who were involved in the construction process
2. Relations between tracks and trains, which include reports of engineers about the technical problems they faced
3. Relations between the railway and passengers, and their personal subjec-tive impressions
These relationships determine another three topics of this article:
The process of railway constructionA passenger inside a wagon as the situation of being encapsulated in the systemTravelling from point A to point B
It is important to remark that these topics are overlaping, and narrations switch between perspectives and topics. A good example is a story told by Károly Gubányi about soldiers who have been transported during the Boxer revolt by the railway from A point to B, and how the Boxer revolt caused diffi-culties for railway construction. Furthermore, I have found that breakdowns (noises) were an integral part of the everyday life of the railway through all three topics. In delineating my analysis of Hungarian sources, I was inspired by
4 Channel and message.
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several works from the anthropology of infrastructure, notably works by Bruno Latour about the Aramis project, which deal with the question of whether or not the border between construction and exploitation of the system can be drawn.5 During writing the part about experiences of ‘being encapsulated’, I was influenced by Stefan Helmreich’s (2009) and Deborah Battaglia’s (2012) work about submarines and space life. Works of Stephen Feld about sound-scape, which involve not only songs but also noises into soundscape of a local environment, were also relevant to the topic (Feld 2012: 255–6, 267–8).6 Thinking about the railway as a means of travelling, I found that Larkin’s descriptions of railways in northern Nigeria provided me with useful insights, such as episodes of celebration (Larkin 2008: 34), noises and breakdowns (Larkin 2008: 217–19). Studies by Mrazek (2002)7 and Elyachar (2010)8 gave examples of how local poor people use infrastructures for their own needs.
Using these insights, I focused my attention mostly on descriptions of the construction process, such as building tunnels, transportation of building materials and tools for construction. Moments of breakdown and accidents during construction (including emotional breakdowns of the narrator) also were of particular interest to me, such as technical catastrophes because of extreme weather conditions, accidents when trains changed temporary rails, and so on.
Railway Construction
Historical contextKároly Gubányi was involved in railway construction in Manchuria from its first day; in fact, he began his work there a year before construction started. He made an important remark about the special status of the Russians in the
5 A railway project in Manchuria seems as a flow of projecting and construction without strict boundaries between these phases. Here, I found that Latour’s approach could be of use, espe-cially his attentiveness to the fluctuating status of the project he studied as living, working and imagined and represented only on paper (Latour 1996).
6 Stephen Feld composed soundtracks and cut documentary sound records on his work with soundscapes (Feld 2012/1982).
7 In historical contexts, Mrazek and Larkin found that every particular infrastructure had its own kind of breakdowns, its own mode of accidents with a unique movement, temporality and vulnerability (Mrazek 2002; Larkin 2008).
8 Elyachar (2010) studied how women in Egypt maintain non-profitable networks, which in longer perspective support rational and practical activities. She studies their efforts as phatic labour.
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region. Although this was not Russian territory, Russian traders were free to travel there and perform commercial activities.
A significant achievement of the Russian expansionist policy was the Saint-Petersburg Agreement signed in 1881, which forced China to open all its northern provinces for Russian traders. In Manchuria, along the Amur, the Sungari, and the Ussuri rivers Russian citizens can carry com-modities from Russian Empire and sell them freely without paying taxes.
Gubányi 1907: 6
Lajos Ligeti paid special attention to the political situation there and tried to connect politics with the railway construction project. He delineated the com-plex history of the railway, which was up till 1929 a very important project both for Tsarist Russia and its later reincarnation, Soviet Russia; but then the Soviet Union gave it to China.
The Moscow government after the Chinese-Russian agreement in 1924 lost all the privileges of Tsarist Russia in China except for the control over the Manchurian Chinese Eastern railroad, and even in this last project Chinese interests were firmly presented.
Ligeti 1934: 30
Ligeti continues:
The Chinese-Russian conflict burst out mainly because of the Manchurian eastern Chinese railway. As I have already mentioned, this was the only privilege left from the old Tsarist times which the Soviet Russia did not relinquish, this inviolability was also upheld by China in a new agree-ment. Russia built the railway to make Trans-Siberian transport more efficient, connecting Manchuli to Harbin, and then Pogranichnaja, and Vladivostok, to shorten considerably the line beginning in Chita and run-ning behind the Amur also to Vladivostok. The direction of it was shared equally between Russians and Chinese. Chinese showed absolutely no gratitude or acknowledgement of the fact that Soviet-Russia had volun-tarily withdrawn its old right for consular judgement, surrendered its old concessions and voluntarily declared invalid the ‘unequal agreements’ which were previously frequently criticised by foreigners. On the con-trary, they recognised these actions as signs of weakness, and they saw that the hour had come to settle accounts with Russia. They started with what was less troublesome and less risky: they arrested in Harbin the Russian director of the Eastern Chinese railways, the Russian Consul, and
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with many other high officials shut them in prison. The railway then was without any hesitation occupied.
Ligeti 1934: 97
CelebrationThe everyday life of an infrastructure seems to consist of everyday burdens of the construction process. We can compare Gubányi’s account of the railway with Larkin’s anthropological approach to the study of railways in north Nigeria (Larkin 2008). The changing modes included everyday routines and moments of celebration (as well as parties); also peaceful periods with some breakdowns. These all made up the certain rhythm of the railway construction process.9 The following description is devoted to an event made for public cel-ebration, in which the organisers tried to involve the audience to witness the construction process and to present it as entertainment. The staged perfor-mance was part of the celebration, and it created an opportunity for people distanced in their everyday life from the construction site to experience it emotionally: sounds, noises, smells, smoke and a little bit of dirt. All these channels for various sensorial ‘noises’ were important to get the complete pic-ture of building the railway:
Finishing up a tunnel was the reason to make a party; the neighbourhood of the tunnel was decorated, a wonderful pavilion was built at the most beautiful point, so that the place of the great struggles would be filled with flags, happiness and summer Manchurian wind. A Russian General, Chigachov, who was a governor of the southern Ussuri region, was the highest ranked guest. Nikolai Sergeevich S. represented the directorship of the rail construction, who was the head of the enormous construction site between Nikolsk and Harbin. [. . .] Guests arrived from Nikolsk to the tunnel on the temporary track in comfortable coaches. A gorgeous walk led through the forest from the station straight to the tunnel, where hun-dreds of Chinese soldiers lined up to welcome the guests. We, all the members of the rail administration, stood there under a direction of Ivan Yulianich. The fanfare by a Cossack trumpeter welcomed the guests, after that an electric shot exploder was brought into action. A thunder-like banging was heard from inside the mountain, a hard, eddying dynamite-smoke flowed out from the gate of the tunnel, which was the
9 Gubányi also gave brief descriptions of how boredom was balanced by other activities (such as dancing, theatre and drinking) in the everyday life of Russians and Cossacks (1907: 256–7, 260–1).
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sign that the last obstacle was exploded too, and which up till this moment closed up the road inside the mountain to its other side. Whilst the smoke caused by the explosion a little dissolved, groups of labourers intruded into the tunnel and air-feeder machines came into action, the lamps were switched on in the obscurity of the tunnel and in a while the whole ceremonial company departed through the newly created tunnel. The company took a special train after dinner and all of us travelled up the other side of the watershed along the staired track (this is a tempo-rary zigzag track built on an ascent before a tunnel through the moun-tain, on which a locomotive with 5–6 wagons with difficulty: with the help of serial changers, moving backwards and forwards could climb up the crest line.
Gubányi 1907: 107
(See Figure 2, below.)
This was the first time that we looked over the places of our struggles through a window of the crystal mirror saloon of a wagon.
Gubányi 1907: 125–7
Figure 2 ‘The (Temporary) staired track’, East Slope of the Van-lun-hoi pass, 1899 ( from Gubányi 1907: 104).
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CentresIn the reports of Hungarian travellers, the first phases of railway construction (planning, logistics and practical rail-constructing) happened in the new indus-trial towns of the region. In supplying new centres with building materials, engineers tried to use already existing infrastructures (road, ships, telegraphs, etc.) and combine them with each other. The period of the Manchurian rail-way construction coincided with the period of the foundation of new towns, such as Harbin. The practical construction work started in four settlements and proceeded between them. Harbin, owing to its strategic position (with construction in three directions), became not only the centre of the railway construction, but also that of the steel industry and machinery production.
Nikolsk, Harbin, Hailar and Port Arthur were the starting points of the con-struction (Gubányi 1907: 29). The headquarters of the construction moved to Harbin, from where it began simultaneously in three directions. The Ussuri railway transported construction materials from Vladivostok, then further by the Iman and Sungari rivers into the inland of Manchuria. In the shoal waters of these unregulated rivers a fleet of specially built boats and barges trans-ported the engines, rails, materials for bridges, food supplies and other neces-sities to the inland of the country (Gubányi 1907: 29). The location where Harbin was built in 1898 was a wide and empty valley. The railway, built on ice, transported all the necessary construction materials for the pillars (Gubányi 1907: 208, 209). Harbin’s population grew to 20,000 people in five years. There were five modern cereal mills, brewery, still and sawmill; meat arrived by
Figure 3 ‘Port at the Iman River’, Iman River, 1898 ( from Gubányi 1907: 28).
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train from Mongolia to the distant places of Manchuria. In 1903 significant territories were given for building houses; competition grew and the prices of the territories were analogous to land in European towns (Gubányi 1907: 295). An industrial town was situated close to the bank of River Sungari, where machines and coaches were assembled, such as locomotives, wagons, steam and electric machines, compressors, all kinds of equipment necessary for the construction. The 700,000 square kilometres of the territory of Manchuria, with 5 million in habitants, quickly augmented to 15 million during the last few years (Gubányi 1907: 272).
Nikolsk was among the other three construction centres. In fact, Gubányi with his own team (Figure 4) first constructed the Nikolsk part of the railway. He left the following description of the town:
Nikolsk is a town of about 20,000 inhabitants, built on a plain territory. It is also one of the administrative centres of the southern Ussuri region. In the centre of the town there are a railway and a telegraph stations, and an enor-mous post office. The town is the centre for the coachpost line network that covers the whole region. There is also the tax office, the state pay-office, and court offices and the permanent garrison with several thousand soldiers. The biggest and most beautiful restaurant is the Austria in Nikolsk. The Austria-hotel was the meeting place for strangers in the period of starting the rail construction, who spoke 4–5 different languages.
Gubányi 1907: 71
Practical Construction WorkWe have only very limited information about the practical construction works and engineering, collecting quantitative data or constructing road for tracks by blasting or drilling rocks:
Ivan Yulianich amassed such abundant quantitative data during the afternoon about the work of drilling the rock [. . .] G. Engineer’s task is to superintend the labour with drills. After the work, he invited us for tea to his place. The building of the engineering office is only a little bit larger than other ordinary houses, and it contains only two rooms and some supplementary small offices. The engineering office occupied a larger room, while another was the engineer’s flat. In the engineering office draughtsmen the copyists and charge-men worked, and a few Chinese translators who were translators of Chinese employees that came to dis-cuss their problems. From here the engineer led us to his own room. In the room we saw three simple tables and a coat-rack. The sewn Japanese
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draught-screen supposedly hid the furniture of the sleeping room [. . .] Then, we began to talk about the situation with accommodations. Ivan Yulianich told us, that on a far distant part of the line the builders had begun to build a new settlement with large accommodations and offices, so, later all comforts would be available.
Gubányi 1907: 109, 94–5, 95
Lack of SpecialistsThe construction for Gubányi was also a form of education, a socialisation pro-cess for workers. He continuously tried to teach workers to get professional skills, because it was very hard to find professionally trained people in Manchuria.10
A solution for the workers question was the biggest dilemma. I had sev-eral hundreds of labourers; however, nobody was an expert in any par-ticular task and most of them had never taken part in tunnel construction at all [. . .] It was almost impossible to find entrepreneurs, such as head-men, machinists, or professional stonemen. Our contracts were valid only for one month, and we never knew when the work would stop, because of any unexpected, disturbing event or accident, so we could not bring specialists from Europe to work in such conditions.
Gubányi 1907: 247, 248
10 Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov also mentioned this in the Soviet context (2003: 119–20).
It was exceptional when one of Gubányi’s friends, an engineer came from Hungary to Manchuria for some months to help him in the construction of a tunnel. (Gubányi 1907: 252).
BreakdownsMy interest here is analogous to Fisch’s (2013)11 and Larkin’s (2008) when they studied how people dealt with breakdowns through not excluding, but rather including them into the system. How can breakdowns be involved into the sys-tem of a rail infrastructure? Furthermore, if the periods have own temporal structure, then as Larkin suggested, breakdowns may also have their own tem-poralities. Larkin investigated the role of pirate video and sound cassettes for the music business in Northern Nigeria. He found that the distorted sound effects, the noise, fading gaps and the blurred picture were all necessary parts of the system. Equipment and technical devices that originally served for mod-ern and colonial interests remained important, although already not as colo-nial (and foreign), but as indigenous (post-colonial) devices (Larkin 2008).12 In this respect, breakdowns became in their own way parts of the local environ-ment and its atmosphere. Simultaneously, the interpretation of breakdowns is only proper in the relationship with unproblematic states of the system with-out breakdowns. Consistency and breakdown parts go together. This also means that there are moments of consistency before and after a breakdown, such as after a struggle with the environment, a starvation, a robbery attack, an epidemic or the Boxer revolt.
Struggle with the EnvironmentOne of the biggest challenges to resolve was an application of provisional tech-nical devices in a permanently changing environment. The rail infrastructure was built at the interface of soil and air. How could the destructive effect of contact between iron (rails and trains) and soft soil be eliminated, not exclud-ing the relationship between soil and air? These circumstances were important because the softness of the soil was partly the result of the seasonal rainy weather. The constructors’ aim was to create an effective and stable infra-structure in relation to a constantly changing environment. How could a bal-ance be found between the infrastructure and the environment?
11 Michael Fisch (2013) studied the Tokyo metro system working beyond its capacity. 12 Brian Larkin, among post-colonial interpreters, claimed that all localities have their own
particular breakdowns. Sasha Newell criticised this type of interpretation because the post-colonial modernisation projects might not have had their own faces (and break-downs), simply by reason that they are no more than reactions to the original colonial interests (Newell 2012: 252, 255).
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From the pipeline bridge, a narrow gauged light railway went to the dense forest. This was the stone transporter track, which ended at an enormous granite rock, from where small coaches transported the construction materials to the pipeline bridge.
Gubányi 1907: 218
A line zigzags to a temporary pair of rails (Gubányi 1907: 107). The small train carried five or six wagons and climbed up the hill in several sequences, waiting at special flat tracks between lifts. This temporary line in the mountains was both dangerous and expensive.
Technicians vigorously quarrel; they worry about the weaknesses of this temporary track, because in some places the gradient is more than 4%. In Europe in these cases, the trains are already supplied with toothed wheels . . . Technicians discuss the details of the last catastrophe, they openly criticise the engineers, who very wantonly risk the lives of the train personnel.
Gubányi 1907: 198
Gubányi continues:
In the rainy seasons the transport was paused for weeks, because the flow of water dropping down washed away parts of the river banks. In this period, accidents happened one after another, broken and washed away wooden bridges, turned up wagons, locomotives fallen into the ditches—all were signs of the vulnerability of the temporary tracks and complexity of such circumstances, in which a compromise with the elements of the wild forces is not so simple [. . .] During the whole of July it was raining almost without pause in torrents along the track, struggling with differ-ent type of difficulties and accidents without any systemic transporta-tion, the construction was stopped for almost a whole month. [. . .] In the storm, the trees along the track fell down on the steel of the rail. The temporary track is like a topsy-turvy sag, logjams of fallen trees lie on the tracks and for some days transport is impossible: the Chinese workers in their huts spend the whole time cuddling and droning, not for any money can anyone go on the road [. . .] This is a weak side of the Chinese workers who fear the rain extremely. The Chinese have no Sundays. So, the holidays come when the rain comes.
Gubányi 1907: 107–108, 238, 222, 43
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StarvationOne of the breakdown topics is starvation. Starvation was a part of the general picture of colonisation (for example, as in India, see Davis 2001: 8, 27, 319, 332). Colonisers arrived in a region and initiated various modernisation projects, among them constructing tracks for the railway. This new work generated a new demand for supplying the workers with local foodstuffs. This demand often came into play very quickly, giving no time for adjustment of the local economy. Prices increased dramatically, leaving locals devoid of supplies. However, this situation became even more drastic when newly constructed railroads opened the region to other distant places. The local community was starving because they were forced to supply constructors, and also distant regions after finishing the railway. Extreme situations became a usual part of everyday life, and the system accustomed to working beyond its capacities (Fisch 2013). Tsing describes how it was possible to avoid such dangers. The case of the Merators in Malaysia shows that the mid-level local traders with their demand for small-scale trading create a buffer zone between the local people and big traders with huge demands for local products. With this mid-level mediator role, they create a gap (obstacle) between the local people in the local environment and an over-demanding faraway market. Without this group, the local system could not counterbalance the huge demand generated by the outsiders; without such middlemen, the local system could not be main-tained further, and it might eventually collapse (Tsing 2005: 185).
In Manchuria, Gubányi observed and experienced something analogous to the above-mentioned situation and recognised the same logic:
Azhiho is a significant trading centre in Central Manchuria and after the rail construction was over it became one of the centres for trading with Manchurian products. A significant part of the enormous railway is sup-plied with foods from here [. . .] During the year prices of the products (vegetables and cattle) of the indigenous Manchus increased three times, owed to the augmenting demand created by growing scale of transporta-tion along the railroad they made superabundant profit [. . .] At any other corner of the world, I would have been in a simpler situation than here. I could have written or telegraphed for food, or at least I could have got it as a loan from somewhere, but here at the very end of the world, in the vast forest what can I do?
Gubányi 1907: 208, 150, 80
It was difficult for Gubányi to organise the logistics of food:
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I sent people to ask for rice and flour loan to the stores at the head- quarters of the local rail construction. We received only some sacks of them, because of the lack of stocks there too. It was only enough for a day. In the Cossack villages in the borderland we also could no get foodstuff. A Cossack ordinarily sells his wheat and from this money he buys flour. A person consumes his own wheat, he mills on the tumble-down small water mill only as much wheat as is exactly enough for a week. So every-body has no sellable stock of flour.
Gubányi 1907: 78
Ligeti, among other things, interpreted the relationships between starvation and robbery activities in relation to the New Year. He saw that robbery and starvation logically balanced each other. A period of robbery followed every starvation period, and a starvation period followed every robbery. The New Year was the event which synchronised these elements and made it possible to interpret starvation and robbery in the frames of a system: a robbery period came before the New Year and a starvation period followed the New Year (Ligeti 1934: 342, 426–7, 461–3).
Robbery AttacksAttacks by bands of robbers were an integral part of the everyday life of rail construction in Manchuria. Gubányi mentioned only Chinese bands, while Cholnoky also noted formerly confined Russians who had escaped from Siberia to Manchuria (Cholnoky 1900: 182). Initially, robbery attacks were not very fre-quent in the region, but after a while they became almost an everyday event even more cruel than before; these were already signs of the forthcoming Boxer revolt.
Around the works of the railroad and selling–buying problems, such as theft and credit affairs, hundred of difficulties also emerged. On one day, members of a Chinese robbery band were arrested on the Russian side of the border. Next morning they escaped from the jail from the Russian fortress. The Cossacks followed them and killed five of them except three who succeeded in escaping.
Gubányi 1907: 96–7
EpidemicsWe can observe the relationship between the troubles connected with the temporary constructions and softness of ground in the rainy season, and the
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Chinese habit of not working when it was raining. The railway line appeared to be a site for potential motion, not only for people and things, but for disease as well; but the railway as a modernisation project opened the road to resolving the problems generated by epidemics. European medicaments could very quickly be transported along the railway line. However a stretch of the railway woud then be closed, because of the quarantine, in order to stop the further spread of infection. Gubányi also mentioned the spiritual aspect in relation to epidemics. Chinese people believed in the spirits of epidemics and suffered from them:
In the settlement of the Chinese workers, in the neighbourhood of the forest a typhus epidemic bursts out. A Chinese persecuted by supersti-tions will not take European medicine, he will not follow a diet, he hates the hospital and he is ready to die but does not give up his prejudices. Those people who had already long time been working with us wholly trusted us in the case of disease; they immediately accepted the medical aid and were totally saved from the devastation of the horrible epidemic [. . .] The cholera epidemic dispersed extremely quickly further to Northern China. In the main station of the Manchurian railway in Harbin there were more than 10,000 Chinese people who dwelled along the rail-road, hundreds became victims of the epidemic [. . .] After the epidemic broke out in the Chinese district of Harbin, at dark night hundreds and hundreds of Chinese people were running with coloured lamps and torches through the streets where the illness appeared more frequently, to attract with light the spirits of the epidemic to the bank of Sungari. On the bank of the river a barge decorated by flags and lightened by various coloured lamps stood. When the people arrived to the bank, immediately all of them blew down their lamps and in a deathlike silence went step-ping on their tiptoes off along side paths to their homes. They were aware that the spirits attracted to the barge would not find their way back in the dark, and surely would find their place on the lighted ship. In a while the ship departed and moved down the river, navigated by some brave men, to take the spirits of cholera as far away as possible, so they would not find their way back [. . .] Along the railroad the health work was installed exemplarily. Collation barracks were organised in every station, from where everyday sanitary wagons transported diseased persons to the hospital, which was supplied with all the necessary medical equipment. In Manchuria 15,000 people at a rough estimate died because of cholera.
Gubányi 1907: 236–7, 264, 266, 270
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The Boxer RevoltEach above-mentioned kind of breakdown (caused by environment, starva-tion, robbery and epidemics) was an integral part of everyday life during rail-way construction. These elements made a type of configuration of a plateau, an atmosphere of a period from which only one particular thing (moment) was crystallised, had effect and could became a historical event.13 This particu-lar thing was the Boxer revolt. During the Boxer revolt, the railway with half-finished infrastructure was one of the main symbols of modernisation, and it was the tool against which the anti-modernisation movement struggled. It was the object, which would be attacked and destroyed (‘killed’) by Chinese peo-ple. It was the object of modernisation, which was cut into pieces, but some of these pieces were still used to protect the system itself.14 For example, Russian soldiers were transported to the front by trains. Civilians also escaped from Manchuria by train. Chinese people attacked the elements of the rail infra-structure as a Russian modernisation project. The centre of railway construc-tion became the centre of the Boxer revolt. Finally, the railway became a strategic military infrastructure, which was used during the war and for which soldiers fought. This brought the railway into the original context of the con-cept of infrastructure and its military significance.15
New and very unexpected messages came from Taku, Tienchin, and Beijing about the destruction of the rail and telegraph lines. At this time in Manchuria along more than 2000 kilometres of railroad altogether there are 7,000 Russian Cossacks in a military service, while the number of Chinese workers surpasses 80,000. A minimum of 70,000 Chinese sol-diers were divided between the territory of Manchuria and the fortresses in North China. In Manchuria the rail constructors had an opportunity to
13 Nélia Dias found analogous cases to the Boxer revolt in West Africa (Dias 2010).14 In Dias’ interpretation, during military occupations, the telegraph and other communica-
tion networks have a significant role. During breakdowns a permanent military presence was not necessary everywhere, because of the existing communication network (Dias 2010: 177–8).
15 Paul Edwards found that the word ‘infrastructure originated in military parlance, (is) referring to fixed facilities such as air bases . . . such as transportation, and communica-tions systems, water and power lines and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons’ (Edwards 2003: 186–7). Dias emphasised this originally military aspect of railway infrastructure in a French West African context. In her interpretation, the military aspect of railways meant supplying troops with provisions and arms (Dias 2010: 177–8).
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worry about the distribution of armed forces, especially in case the war encroached from North China to Manchuria. The direction of the rail construction of the Eastern sequence of the Manchurian railways resided at this time in the border station of Pogranichnaja . . . The residents, the officials, and the workers of the border region were frightened when they listened to the news and the anxiety was intensified by the fact that the Cossack officer that had defended this section of the railway a few days ago departed to Harbin after the command given by telegraph and only seven Cossacks remained at the station to manage the necessary service . . . Furthermore, there was not enough armed assistance and the officials simultaneously were charged to send their families by the after-noon train to Nikolsk and everybody, who was worried about own per-sonal safety, could freely leave by this train. [. . .] On a side track in front of the building of the superior officials, a locomotive smoked and was ready for the trip. A whistle of the train departing with refugees sounded down the valley [. . .] When the people working along the railroad saw the train with refugees occupying open wagons in a long line, they immedi-ately threw down their equipment, stopped work and excitedly argued about what to do. On arrival home I discovered a whole group of per-turbed Russian workers waiting for me, who immediately wanted to leave the place of work and who only after a very patient incitement calmed down a little.
Gubányi 1907: 145–6, 146, 147
Other Approaches to the Railway
Gubányi looks at the railway through the construction process, and we can learn a lot through this perspective. However, this was not the only way of engaging with infrastructures in Manchuria. Besides this viewpoint there were numerous other perspectives on the railway as infrastructure. Here, I would like to add two more approaches: ‘being encapsulated inside the system’ and ‘travelling from point A to point B’. We had already encountered these topics in earlier descriptions, for example, when trains transported soldiers to the front during the war with China (during the Boxer revolt), or when travelling by train was a programme point of the celebration event during the opening of a new tunnel. From the texts we can see that it was a pleasure and adventure for the Hungarian travellers, scholars and engineers to travel by train in Manchuria. For example, Gubányi switched to another perspective, from professional construc-tor to passenger, during vacations, when he travelled along the whole branch.
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Being Encapsulated Inside the TrainThe soundscape of a particular environment contains not only signals, but also noises (Feld 2012/1982). Signal and channel interfere with each other. Michel Serres called this interference ‘noise’ (Serres 2007/1981). Every environment has its own sound(scape): i.e. signal, channel and noise.
Tintinnabulation of a hanging steel-rail was the signal for lunchtime for the constructors at the neighbourhood of the campsite.
Gubányi 1907: 219
Workers used a piece of railway to make a sound that signalled an important moment in the everyday routine of railway construction. How did this sound differ from other sounds at the construction site? The same sounds were them-selves routines for workers, but something made this particular tintinnabula-tion a signal rather than a noise.
Sometimes, noises are messages by themselves, they can show that some work is going on or something is moving on, and that there is no danger in this. On the contrary, an abrupt silence after constant noise could be an important message of danger. Geleta’s observation on hunting during travelling shows how sudden stops and end of noises become signals of danger, but noises per se are ignored and do not sound suspicious.
On the third day, however, I made good use of my rifle by shooting a bus-tard. This, too, is a peculiar sport. The Mongolians nearly always ride on horseback and never hurt birds so the birds are not afraid of them. Pedestrians, however, seem to frighten them, for at sight of anybody walking the birds immediately take to their wings. While a horse or a car-riage is in motion the bustards calmly continue to search for insects on the ground, but the moment they stop the birds are up in a flash. It is not difficult to outwit them, when one knows their peculiarities.
Forbáth/Geleta 1936: 97
Silence can be one of the first signs of the encapsulation of the system we appear to be inside. Ideally, inside there should be a silence inside the train cabin, and passengers can know little about the work of engines, friction between wheels and tracks or changes in speed. The temporality is common for them who are inside the system. This silence is a proof of good insulation (as well as isolation) and creates a new temporality different from the tempo-rality of the world outside the system (such as the tempo for construction of the railway). Travelling inside the cabin creates a different appreciation of time
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in comparison with travelling differently, even if the same route from point A to point B is covered. Passengers sit motionless inside the cabin that is in motion. This discrepancy changes people’s experience of travelling, it is now less about movement and more about immobility. Travelling by train is a para-doxical experience in this respect.
Sleepers occupied all the bottoms of the wooden seats and the shelves for baggage besides the ordinary places.
Gubányi 1907: 241
But sometimes, different encapsulated systems merge, although for short moments, as if their orbits cross each other and bodies go through each other like waves.
After lunch there is a moment when different types of wagons (cargo, passengers, post wagons) mixed up in one train go from Harbin. There is always an acquaintance in the train, and usually somebody cries out news from the window, often a letter, or a parcel is thrown from the wagon.
Gubányi 1907: 220
As Gubányi described, there were moments when one system (local construc-tion brigade) could be synchronised with another system (in our case the train passing by from Harbin). A message was able to be sent from one system to another system at these moments of synchronisation.
TravellingBesides ‘constructing railway’ and ‘being encapsulated inside the train’, a third possible approach to railway as infrastructure is the ‘travelling from point A to point B’. Here, we come back to the Boxer revolt mentioned above. In the situ-ations of breakdowns (agonies, crises) during the Boxer revolt there were moments of success for maintaining the rail infrastructure, but the railway still was part of a larger infrastructure and it could not work totally autonomously without being influenced by the changed (or unchanged) political climate: ‘The complete railway was opened on the 1st of July in 1903 in Manchuria, and twice a week trains from Port Arthur and Dalni departed and came through Manchuria to the Baikal region’ (Gubányi 1907: 282). ‘. . . In 1907 thousands of Russian peasants migrated by train through Siberia to the regions of Amur and Ussuri rivers’ (Gubányi 1908: 4).
These were the political aims for the construction of such a road—the colo-nisation of new territory. But beside such general political aims, ordinary peo-ple could also use the road to get to another location. Among these people
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were Hungarians. For example, Baráthosi, during his travelling by train in Manchuria, searched for contact with indigenous people, who lived on land where the railway was built.
We excitedly got on the train to go 800 kilometres on the Ussuri branch to Khabarovsk to our bark. I was waiting to meet indigenous people on this line, but I was disappointed, because the train crossed only the Cossack settlements. The railroad was built not on marshlands, but at higher alti-tudes. And the Russians moved there.
Baráthosi 1930a: 25
‘Railway’ LifestyleRailways impressed and obsessed Hungarian travellers. Even if their reports about their travelling mainly contained exotic pictures of the far-distant places and peoples, the natural way they used the railway in their accounts shows their aim of overcoming this exotisation and showing these places as modern and contemporaneous, and especially to present themselves as modern and advanced. Gubányi presented his perspective on life and railway infrastructure not only in frames of a scientific book and articles. He also published a novel in 1915. His novel, The Graves in Mukden, is a story dated to 1904 (a year after Gubányi had left Manchuria). Contrary to his scientific book and articles, here his engineer perspective is hidden. Gubányi shows a secondary line for the nar-ration, beside the main story about an aristocratic English woman who is travelling from London to Manchuria, where her brother lives, and the back-ground of the political situation during the war between Russia and Japan. The story develops in scenes related to railways: waiting halls for passengers, wagons, railway stations, etc. A simultaneous reading of Graves in Mukden and Five Years in Manchuria gives an opportunity to appreciate and to take seri-ously the construction perspective on railway infrastructure. There is also an impression, that the reading of Gubányi’s books was an entertaining and pleas-ant activity for people who wanted to be modern in the beginning of the twen-tieth century.
Conclusion
This article gave a voice for the original Hungarian sources about railway con-struction in Manchuria. The infrastructural and cybernetic anthropological interpretations of Hungarian materials allowed us to view constructional ‘breakdowns’ as compulsive and integral elements of the system. Using this
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methodology, two aspects of travelling—moving inside and outside the system—became visible and accessible for analysis. Finally, it was also inter-esting to see railway construction in Manchuria from the perspective of a constructor/engineer as a process of becoming, which included simultane-ously developing and destroying processes.
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