Manchuria

Manchuria is the name outsiders gave to the vast northeast corner of China, homeland of the Manchu people who took Beijing in 1644 and ruled China as the Qing dynasty until 1912. It is a land of forested mountains, black-soil plains, and long frozen winters, and in the 20th century its coal, iron, soybeans, and railways made it the most fought-over territory in Northeast Asia. Russia, Japan, and China all contested it, and Japan's seizure of it in 1931 was an early step toward the Second World War in Asia. China today avoids the term Manchuria because of its association with Japanese rule, and calls the region Dongbei, the Northeast.

In the narrow sense used today, Manchuria covers China's three northeastern provinces, Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, about 800,000 square kilometers with nearly 99 million people at the 2020 census, plus the eastern prefectures of Inner Mongolia. The Northeast China Plain, drained by the Songhua and Liao rivers, lies at its center, enclosed by the Greater and Lesser Khingan ranges on the west and north and the Changbai Mountains along the North Korean border on the east. The Amur and Ussuri rivers mark its northern and eastern edges. Beyond them lies Outer Manchuria, roughly 1 million square kilometers of taiga and Pacific coast, now in Russia's Amur Oblast, Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Khabarovsk Krai, and Primorsky Krai, including the port of Vladivostok.

The Jurchen ancestors of the Manchus founded the Jin dynasty there in the 12th century, and their descendant Nurhaci built the Later Jin state that became the Qing. The Qing long restricted Han Chinese settlement behind the Willow Palisade, but under Russian pressure they ceded the lands north of the Amur by the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and east of the Ussuri by the Convention of Peking in 1860. Russia then built the Chinese Eastern Railway through Harbin, and after its defeat in 1905 Japan took over the southern railway zone. Following the 1931 Mukden Incident, Japan created the puppet state of Manchukuo, which lasted until the Soviet invasion of August 1945. Agreements between China and Russia since 1991 have settled the river border, including a 2008 division of islands near Khabarovsk.

• North Korea
  The world's most isolated state on the northern half of the Korean peninsula borders
• Amur River
  The border river of the Russian Far East and Manchuria bounded by
• The Qing Empire
  Chinas last imperial dynasty, whose Manchu rulers more than doubled the land under Beijing formerly part of
• The Qing Empire
  Chinas last imperial dynasty, whose Manchu rulers more than doubled the land under Beijing homeland of
• Eastern Asia
  China, Japan, the Koreas, Mongolia — a quarter of humanity located in
• The Russian Empire
  The tsarist state that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific and, for a time, into North America partly ceded to
• China
  The world's most populous nation reborn as an economic superpower today part of
• Russia
  The largest country on Earth, spanning Europe and Asia across eleven time zones today part of (Outer Manchuria)