Edward Henry Harriman
Lasciamo Krasnoyarsk with train 340, the Moscow-Cita. We divide the compartment with Kan Wei Hong, one of the many Chinese who flock to the car in which foreigners are concentrated. From his bag of black cloth spreads the smell of the Chinese spice that ten years ago, in London, used to marinate the pork chops when I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant, orders a chef in Hong Kong fan of opera .
Kan, like his compatriots, is headed for China, to Harbin, and to get there, take in Chita the Chinese Eastern Railway, the branch of the Trans-Siberian railway was built between 1897 and 1901 to reach Vladivostok through a corridor that the Tsar had obtained the empire China. The Russians had to defend it from the Boxer Rebellion in 1899 and retained control after the defeat in the war against Japan in 1905, after which Russia had to surrender to the Japanese South Manchuria is located in the railway. The South Manchurian Railway, however, linking Beijing to the Chinese Eastern Railway, fell under Japanese control.
An American, Edward Henry Harriman, tried to buy both sections, pursuing his project of a railway circumplanetaria. He began buying shares of railroad companies in 1870, when twenty-two, was a broker at the Stock Exchange on Wall Street. In 1881 he took complete control of a railroad in the State of New York, thirty miles in all. In the nineties skillfully exploited the crisis in the stock market and put his hands on the Union Pacific Railroad. He became famous for having inspected the line, from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean in 1898, meticulously checking every mile of track, every exchange, every locomotive, every car. In the end, solved all the problems, he was exhausted, but the railroad found itself in excellent health. After a short holiday to which he had forced the doctor, 31 May 1899, left the port of Seattle on board the steamship George W. Elder : it had organized a scientific expedition in Alaska, with the aim of collecting data for the construction of a railroad passing through. The trip gave Harriman a reputation as intrepid explorer, a fjord and a glacier took his name, but the original design was abandoned, as well as negotiations for the purchase of the Chinese Eastern Railway. The Russians held the check until 1935, when they sold it to Japan, three years before he had again invaded Manchuria, renaming it Manchukuo. Stalin recovered thanks to the agreements of Yalta, and handed over to China in 1952 as a gesture of brotherhood. Relations between the USSR and China, however, got worse, until the fighting armed on the Ussuri River in 1969. The railroad then was closed and it was only in the eighties which was reconnected to the Trans-Siberian.
No matter where you arrive, if they're on the train, said Gianmaria, Harriman, and if we had carried out his plan to arrive in New York.
The train left us at the station of Irkutsk to 8:30 am. On top of the staircase from the lobby door subway six taxi drivers offering their services to a wave of commuters. Kids are camped out in camouflage backpacks and sleeping mats in every room waiting, perhaps go to the colony. One of them instead of camouflage wearing a black sweatshirt with the words "Fuck the system". In the lobby there is also a Seventh Day Adventist, white shirt, tie, pants and shoes blacks, speaking at the American mobile phone and the name written in Cyrillic on the plate hanging from his shirt pocket.
As in every station of the Trans-Siberian, clocks and scoreboards of departures and arrivals mark Moscow time, five time zones away, but here the opening hours are posted on the doors of the Ticket based on local time, so the compactness of the cracking microcosm of the railroad, a long tentacle of Moscow over nine thousand kilometers.
reach the block of all'undici Proletarskaya Ulica where it should be the home of Mrs. Lena, with whom we booked an overnight stay. Doors and gates are wide open and there are no telephones. We are about to leave to find a pay phone from which you can contact the owner when a girl comes and opens one of the heavy metal doors, the reach and take the package with the name and address of our guest. I confirm that the address is right but shakes her head reading the name of Mrs. Lena. However, we are part and follow the stairs in search of the interior number 15, we find that to be the girl next door. Sound the bell, Mrs. Lena opens the door, welcomed us warmly and welcomed the close.
The owner is a lady of about fifty, small in stature and lively, which makes us sit in a room furnished with dark wood and massive beds covered with leopard print fabric. He knows a few words of English and strives to explain how to visit the city and how to obtain the registration of the visa, but we find it hard to understand what it means.
Irkutsk lived a happy time after the conspiracy of the Decembrists in December 1825. The rebels were aristocrats of the Enlightenment ideas that had attempted to overthrow the regime of Tsar Nicholas I. The plan had failed, five conspirators were hanged and the other confined to Siberia. Their families settled in Irkutsk, where, thanks to energetic wives and large estates, built hospitals and vocational schools for the people and naturalistic studies of the region started the model of ' Encyclopédie . Today's utopia are the residences of the Decembrists, wooden houses whose windows concentrated in himself the whole decoration of the building: the contours are masterpieces of wooden sculpture and shutters are painted in concentric squares, sometimes with diamond pattern, with bright colors, green, blue and white, or refined combinations of gray, beige, brown, orange.
In Irkutsk there is an information office for tourists, is unusual in Siberia, where to book three seats on the minibus to the island of Olkhon Lake Baikal. We go there the next day and Khuzir, the only village on the island, we find overnight accommodation in a private home. All buildings are wooden and have shutters and gates painted, the doors have locks and the roads are not paved. We are in a group of homes where each family contains some tourists, all Russians, and the women gather together to cook for us visitors, then we gathered for dinner in a common dining room overlooking the courtyard. The attraction of Olkhon is a rocky promontory that was one of five places sacred to the shamans of the region, but there is also a marina where you can photograph rusty ships and wooden buildings with facades whose plot is reminiscent of a cluttered shelf book so that no gaps.
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