China's best-equipped military base is located in a remote town with a meaningless name of Lushun, but the place is known to the world as Port Arthur.
Located in the western part of the Liaodong Bay, the harbor on which this port stands is surrounded on four sides by hills, as if specially created to shelter warships from the enemy.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, when China acquired an armored fleet, Port Arthur has become the main base for its northern group. Occupied by the Japanese from 1894 to 1895, it was, according to the Shimonoseki Treaty, rented by them. However, this step was contrary to the interests of Germany, France and Russia, who insistently demanded that the peninsula taken by force be returned to China.
Expanding their presence in the East, the Russians even took a number of steps aimed at leasing the Liaodong Gulf and the peninsula, and there were even cases of offering bribes to high-ranking Chinese officials. And in 1898, such an agreement was reached, and Port Arthur gradually began to turn into the main base of the Russian fleet in this Pacific region.
Japan did not like this development very much. In FebruaryIn 1904, the Russian-Japanese confrontation began, during which the Russian military command made a lot of mistakes. And although the sailors and ordinary soldiers fought like real heroes, the military department, which was not ready for such an outcome of events, still lost this war. The retribution for such a narrow-minded leadership for Russia was truly terrifying. In addition to material and human losses during the hostilities, she had to agree to shameful conditions. The surrender of Port Arthur ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth, according to which not only the Liaodong Peninsula and the South Manchurian Railway, but also half of Sakhalin went to Japan.
The Russians had to wait almost four decades for satisfaction.
And only in August 1945, the military forces previously concentrated in the Far East and Transbaikalia were able to start hostilities. The Japanese resisted fiercely, but as soon as our troops managed to break into the Hailar bastion and overcome the impregnable, as the Japanese believed, Greater Khingan, the morale of the enemy was broken.
On August 23, an impressive landing force descended on Port Arthur by parachutes and seaplanes, the Japanese surrendered the city without a fight.
It was, perhaps, at that time the only operation in terms of its scale, which the Russians brilliantly carried out from beginning to end.
In the same year, the USSR concludes a well-known agreement with the Kuomintang government, according to which Port Arthur is leased to him for wholethirty years. But literally a few years later, Chiang Kai-shek fled, and the then leadership of the CPSU, in order not to spoil relations with the fraternal CCP in those years, liberated Port Arthur at the beginning of 1955, removing all its troops from it.
Port Arthur today is a closed city, foreign citizens are not allowed there. And access to the 203rd height and the Russian cemetery is still open.
