The retrocession of the Liaotung Peninsula had not been effected by Russia alone.  Germany and France had co-operated, and they also expected from China a mark of gratitude in some tangible form.  On this point the statesmen of Berlin held very strong views, and they thought it advisable to obtain a material guarantee for the fulfilment of their expectations by seizing Kiaochau, on the ground that German missionaries had been murdered by Chinese fanatics.

For Russia this was a most unwelcome incident.  She had earmarked Kiaochau for her own purposes, and had already made an agreement with the authorities in Peking that the harbour might be used freely by her fleet.  And this was not the worst.  The incident might inaugurate an era of partition for which she was not yet prepared, and another port which she had earmarked for her own use might be seized by a rival.  Already English ships of war were reported to be prowling about in the vicinity of the Liaotung Peninsula.  She hastened to demand, therefore, as a set-off for the loss of Kiaochau, a lease of Port Arthur and Talienwan, and a railway concession to unite these ports with the Trans-Siberian Railway.  The Chinese Government was too weak to think of refusing the demands, and the process of gradually absorbing Manchuria began, in accordance with a plan already roughly sketched out in St. Petersburg.

In the light of a few authentic documents and many subsequent events, the outline of this plan can be traced with tolerable accuracy.  In the region through which the projected railways were to run there was a large marauding population, and consequently the labourers and the works would have to be protected; and as Chinese troops can never be thoroughly relied on, the protecting force must be Russian.  Under this rather transparent disguise a small army of occupation could be gradually introduced, and in establishing a modus vivendi between it and the Chinese civil and military authorities a predominant influence in the local administration could be established.  At the same time, by energetic diplomatic action at Peking, which would be brought within striking-distance by the railways, all rival foreign influences might be excluded from the occupied provinces, and the rest might be left to the action of “spontaneous infiltration.”  Thus, while professing to uphold the principle of the territorial integrity of the Celestial Empire, the Cabinet of St. Petersburg might practically annex the whole of Manchuria and transform Port Arthur into a great naval port and arsenal, a far more effectual “Dominator of the East” than Vladivostok, which was intended, as its name implies, to fulfil that function.  From Manchuria the political influence and the spontaneous infiltration would naturally extend to Korea, and on the deeply indented coast of the Hermit Kingdom new ports and arsenals, far more spacious and strategically more important than Port Arthur, might be constructed.