Harbin, in China’s far northeast, owes its modern beginnings entirely to a railway.
For the first three decades of the 20th century, it was effectively a Russian city.
It is a place that has sparked my curiosity ever since I came across a 1927 ship’s passenger list that revealed the name of my grandfather Frank Newman’s “second wife”: Nina Kovaleva, 25, born in Sevastopol, Russia. He would leave his Shanghai-based family with her in the early 1930s.
The list also named a daughter, Kyra, aged five, born in Harbin. It was a stunning revelation. It implied that my grandfather, an inspector for the Harbin postal subdistrict from about 1912, had led a double life for at least a decade.
I conta
Nov 22, 2019
