YINKOW AND NIUCHWANG.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11253, 11 May 1904, Page 5

YINKOW AND NIUCHWANG.

For more than three months in the year, the river- Liao, upon which Niuehwamg stands, ip completely cloned by ice, and du£ ing this period the residents are practically cut off from the outer •world. The country .round about Niuchwang is bare and desolate, and in sailing up the river a. most cheerless prospect greets the traveller's eye. It is surrounded by dreary marshes, and the land under cultivation produces principally boaiih, which forms ono of the chinf

articles of trade of the port. Niuchwang is the most northerly port in China open to foreign trade. It w called by the natives Yingtzu, which means military station, and that was the only use formerly made of the port. The place, however, is more generally known by the name of Yinkow. Tlie town ol NiucUwang itself is distant from Yinkow about 30 miles. It- is a 6parsely populated and uninteresting place, but the advent of the -Marichurian line, which connects with the Trans-Siberia.n railway, rapidly increased its, importance. Tlie extension of the Shanhaiwan railway to Niuchwang,. and continuance of the Manchurian line to Port Arthur, the point of the "Regent's Swori," orLiabtung Peninsula, still further increased the importance of the town.' Niuchwang- is the treaty port that the Russians definitely promised to evacuate on October 8 last. In 1898 the Russian railway — or, as it is officially known, the Chinese-Eastern Railway — Company, it has been pointed out, acquired through Ministerial pressure at Pejtin a large property some two miles from tlie foreign settlement, which was, established iri 1861, a property the boundaries of which have been steadily widening.