[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]
CHINA RAILWAYS.
CONFIDENTIAL.
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[13147]
[April 10.]
SECTION 1.
19607
[AMENDED COPY
REC
No. 1. REG 16 JUN 11
Sir G. Buchanan to Sir Edward Grey.-(Received April 10.)
(No. 89. Secret.) Sir,
St. Petersburgh, April 5, 1911.
I HAVE the honour to transmit herewith a memorandum which has been drawn up by Mr. Kidston, second secretary to this embassy, on the subject of the visit to St. Petersburgh of Lord ffrench, representative in China of Messrs. Pauling and Co., and of his conversations with high Russian officials with regard to railway construction in Manchuria.
I have, &c.
GEORGE W. BUCHANAN.
Enclosure in No. 1.
Memorandum by Mr. Kidston.
LORD FFRENCH, the representative in China of Messrs. Pauling and Co., has been in St. Petersburgh for some time, and has had conversations with various high officials on the subject of his firm's schemes for railway construction in Manchuria.
On the 26th March he was received by M. Kokovtsoff, the Minister of Finance, who said that the Russian Government had no desire to obstruct railway construction in Manchuria, but that certain routes must be excluded. M. Kokovtsoff, in the course of further conversation, gave Lord ffrench clearly to understand that Russia's opposition to the Chinchow-Aigun scheme had not been due to apprehensions for her own frontier in the neighbourhood of Blagovestebensk, as had been generally supposed, but to fear of the strategic advantage which a port on the Gulf of Pechili at Chinchow might offer to Japan in case of hostilities. Japan might seize Chinchow, throw troops up the line to Tsitsihar, cut the Chinese Eastern Railway there, and so isolate Harbin and Vladivostock. M. Kokovtsoff even went so far as to ask what was the good of building lines at all in Southern Manchuria, when all that country was inevitably destined to fall to the Japanese?
The question of a line southwards from Hailar was then broached, but M. Kokovtsoff objected that this was coming too near the Russian frontier.
(Lord ffrench has since informed me that he has absolutely reliable information from Chinese sources to the effect that many years ago Russia acquired from the Chinese Government the option for the construction of a line from Hailar to Peking. It may be remembered that before the Russo-Japanese war there were rumours that construction on this line was actually begun, and a book published under the name of "Wirt Gerrare" contained circumstantial accounts of the work, and photographs of construction trains running on the line. In 1903 I travelled along the route, and found that these stories were pure fiction.)
M. Kokovtsoff then suggested that Pauling's might be satisfied with a line from Harbin to Tao-nan-fu. Lord ffrench objected that it would be folly for China to build a line with an outlet to the Manchurian Railway and no connection with her own system, an argument which led naturally to the suggestion that such a line might be extended to Peking by way of Jehol.
Lord ffrench said that all his firm wanted was railways to construct, and M. Kokovtsoff gave him to understand that his Government would have no objection to the scheme indicated.
Lord ffrench then referred to the Russian opposition to the project for a railway from Tsitsibar to Aigun, and M. Kokovtsoff said that the Russian Government would have no objection to the construction of a line from Tsitsihar as far as Mergen, but that it must not go further northwards towards the Russian frontier.
The upshot of the conversation, therefore, was that Lord ffrench was given to suppose that the Russian Government would have no objection to lines being con-
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