Shanghai Russians
ethnic group in China
The Shanghai Russians, a sizable part of the Russian diaspora, flourished in Shanghai, China, between the World Wars. By 1937 an estimated up to 25,000 Russians lived in the city; they formed the largest European group there by far. Most of them had come from the Russian Far East, where, with the support of the Japanese, the Whites had maintained a presence as late as the autumn of 1922.
Background
In the late 19th century, the Russian imperial government was shifting the focus of its investment to northeast China. It developed the Chinese Eastern Railway first in Heilongjiang linking Harbin to Vladivostok, and later to Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula. As a consequence, China's trade with its northern neighbour soared. As soon as there was a regular ferry service between Vladivostok and Shanghai, the Russian tea merchants started to settle in the commercial capital of China. About 350 Russian citizens resided within the Shanghai International Settlement in 1905. In order to protect their interests, the Russian consulate was opened in 1896. The old building of the consulate, still occupied by the Russian diplomats, ranks among the Bund's minor landmarks.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shanghai Russians” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.