This would not be the last time an assault on heaven’s domain would spread from behind Shenyang’s city walls.

A few kilometres northeast of the old palace’s ornate pavilions, spacious courtyards and vermilion walls, stands a more sobering site, a grey stone rendering of a calendar broken by shells and bullets that fronts the September 18th Historical Museum – recalling the fateful day in 1931 when explosives were detonated on a railway line just outside the city.

Although the explosion was minor and killed no one, the Mukden incident, as it came to be known, would have far-reaching consequences.

It was, in fact, a false-flag operation led by colonels Kanji Ishiwara and Seishiro Itagaki of the Japanese Kwantung Army, a semi-independent force closely aligned with the South Manchuria Railway Company that had become notorious for violating orders from mainland Japan.

The finger was pointed at the Chinese, who had soldiers stationed nearby, and seven military trains loaded with Japanese soldiers were soon rolling into Manchuria from Japanese-controlled Korea, followed by an additional four military trains the next day.

By September 19, the Kwantung Army had effectively taken possession of the old Manchu capital.

Despite being an act of military insubordination, the Mukden incident enjoyed wide support among the public in Japan, prompting politicians in Tokyo to mute any concerns they had as the takeover of Manchuria continued apace.

“Piece by piece, provocation by provocation, the Kwantung Army expanded its reach across Manchuria,” writes Ezra Vogel, in China and Japan: Facing History (2019), and by “December 1931, all political parties in the Diet [Japanese parliament] supported a bill to thank the military for protecting Japan’s rights in China.”

Within six months, all of Manchuria was under Japanese control, established as the client state Manchukuo, with Xinjing (now Changchun) as its capital.

International outrage at the time led to diplomatic isolation and Japan’s 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations. But this did little to slow the momentum as the Japanese militarists continued to expand their grip over northern Chinese territory.

By that year they controlled the Great Wall region north of Beijing, and by 1935 much of what is now Hebei province was in Japanese hands.

The friction between the expansive Empire of the Sun and the chaos-plagued Republic of China finally sparked total war in 1937, when a skirmish near Beijing’s Marco Polo Bridge escalated into all-out conflict, as what would become the European theatre of World War II brewed in Hitler’s Germany.

Like many fabled dynasties, the Qing got off to a good start. The first Manchu emperors unified the fractured Ming empire they had acquired, before expanding the realm to incorporate the prairies of Mongolia and the deserts of Xinjiang.

The island of Taiwan was conquered and made a prefecture of Fujian in 1684, while the Qing exerted military and administrative control of Tibet from 1720.

A century after capturing the Dragon Throne, however, the House of Aisin-Gioro was a shadow of its former self, supercilious and detached, presiding over a territory Lord Macartney described after the failed British mission of 1793 as an “old, crazy, first-rate man o’war which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these hundred and fifty years past”.

Far beyond the grandeur of Beijing’s Imperial Palace, as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, the wheels of the industrial age started driving European colonialists ever further afield, where their technological supremacy made it easier to subjugate whoever they encountered, as China would discover when British gunboats made short work of its war junks in the early 1840s.

After the first opium war concluded with the Treaty of Nanking, in 1842, merchants began pouring into newly opened treaty ports along China’s coast.

Countries such as Britain, France and Germany established themselves in various international enclaves where they recreated versions of their homelands complete with landscaped gardens, private clubs and stately manors.

They soon plotted to connect these properties. Since the first railway between Liverpool and Manchester began public service, in the 1830s, the iron road had spread across the industrialised world.

Trains might have been a convenient means of transport for Europeans at home, but overseas, the railway served as a tool of empire with which to dominate local economies and demark spheres of influence. The age of naval imperialism was morphing into the age of railway imperialism.

However, it would not prove easy to lay rails across heaven’s domain. China’s first railway, the British-built Woosung Road in Shanghai, ran for just over a year, from 1876 to 1877, before it was dismantled by the Chinese authorities and left to rust on a beach in Taiwan.

While China’s Mandarins, as sinologist Lloyd Eastman wrote, feared “the movement of the locomotives, and the stench of their engines, would upset the balance of geomantic forces, with catastrophic consequences for both the living and the dead”, just across the East China Sea attitudes were very different.

The arrival of Westerners in East Asia and the defeat of China in the first opium war prompted Japan, hitherto an isolated society of shoguns and geishas, to take a different approach from its giant continental neighbour.

Under Emperor Meiji, an unprecedented programme of study and reform was initiated. This included the Iwakura mission, whereby the country’s best and brightest were sent to 15 countries over three years to study everything from mines to universities to army bases.

As Vogel puts it, “Never before and never since has any country sent so many young officials on such a long study tour of other countries.”

Illustrative of the speed with which Japan “caught up” is how quickly it joined the railway age, the country’s first line, connecting Shimbashi (now in central Tokyo) and Yokohama on the coast, inaugurated on October 14, 1872, some 37 years before China’s first domestically constructed Imperial Peking-Kalgan Railway opened for traffic.

To this day, October 14 is honoured as National Railway Day in Japan, its 150th anniversary celebrated last year.

The railway signalled Japan’s fast-track admission as a member of what was then a tiny club of industrialised nations. Progress was prodigious. By the start of the 20th century, Japan had nearly 60,000km (37,000 miles) of railway tracks and had laid the foundation for what remains one of the finest public railway services on the planet.

Rapid industrialisation fuelled Japan’s ambitions, and it soon began to imagine a European-style empire of its own. In 1894, Japan took on China for control of Korea and won, leading Beijing to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which stipulated that China must recognise the independence of Korea and cede control of Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula to the Japanese.

Japan would control Taiwan for a further 50 years, laying its railways and developing the island’s industrial base. But, just six days after the signing of the treaty, the ministers of Russia, Germany and France called on the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to assert that if Japan were to occupy the Liaodong peninsula “it would be an obstacle to peace in East Asia”.

A ratification of the treaty returned Liaodong to China, prompting a backlash in the Japanese press, but Beijing had some serious soul-searching to do.

At the time, the Qing empire had a little under 500km (310 miles) of functioning railway. But defeat at the hands of a smaller Asian neighbour prompted progressives in the Manchu court to begin taking technologies they had long deemed “barbarian manufactures” more seriously.

Lacking any technical know-how themselves, however, foreign syndicates were awarded contracts to construct railways, prompting a scramble for railway concessions among European powers eager to dominate trade and transport in the Middle Kingdom.

In the northeast, the Qing court secretly turned to its northern neighbour Russia as a counterweight to Japanese expansionism in the region. The timing was auspicious. St Petersburg was busy building its Trans-Siberian Railway, the world’s longest, and was looking to make a cost-effective short cut through China.

After some negotiation, Russia was granted permission to lay tracks across the Manchurian plains that had birthed the Qing dynasty centuries earlier.

It would prove to be a fateful move, one that would turn northeast China into a theatre of competition – a “great game” that would see it criss-crossed with 3,000km of tracks when vast swathes of the interior had none at all.

Unfortunately for China, its new Russian frenemy had imperial designs of its own. In 1903, Minister of Finance Sergei Witte expressed how Russia’s railway concession in Manchuria was viewed in St Petersburg, stating that, “Given our enormous frontier line with China and our exceptionally favourable situation, the absorption by Russia of a considerable portion of the Chinese empire is only a question of time.”

St Petersburg had been evaluating its East Asia position since Russian troops had been forced out of Xinjiang at the end of the Muslim uprising (1862-1877). It was believed Russia’s position had been weakened because of the absence of a Siberian railroad.

After the Sino-Japanese war (1894-95), Russian hawks began advocating that, should the Japanese establish themselves in Manchuria, they would soon be looking to expand their influence into Siberia.

This added renewed urgency to the chorus of voices lobbying to build a railway past the Ural Mountains that separate European Russia from its vast eastern territories.

The imperial coffers were running dangerously low at the time, and Russia’s transport grid was inadequate even in its most densely populated quarters. But the argument for strategic expansion ultimately won the tsar’s blessing.

The prospect of symbolically wiring together Moscow in the west and Vladivostok in the east via 9,000km of track was simply too good an opportunity to miss for a regime that had begun to see its eastward expansion in terms of “social Darwinism” and “manifest destiny”, as Sarah Paine, professor of history and strategy at the US Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island, puts it.

It is easy to see what Russia wanted in northeast China. Fin de siècle Manchuria was a land of untapped riches, with fertile soil as well as coal and iron. This was because, for much of the Qing era, the region had been kept out of bounds to non-Manchu subjects.

It wasn’t until 1820 that the Han Chinese population had been formally allowed to settle “beyond the wall”. The immigrants were mostly of northern peasant stock, attracted by virgin farmlands quilting a region roughly the size of Britain and France combined.

Foreign actors soon started taking notice. Strategically located between Korea, Mongolia, Russia, China and Japan, this was a global crossroads in an age before air travel.

The Trans-Siberian Railway crept eastwards from 1891 until it met the Chinese frontier in 1897, when the construction of the Chinese section, the Chinese Eastern Railway, began in earnest.

Things would turn sour for Russian engineers when their grand project met with the Boxer rebellion, an anti-foreign peasant movement that erupted in north China at the turn of the century. The Boxers targeted colonial infrastructure and managed to damage two-thirds of the Russian railway before St Petersburg deployed men to keep the peace.

Despite the disruption, the Chinese Eastern Railway was eventually completed in 1902, a 1,727km diagonal strike across northeast China from Manzhouli to Suifenhe. It was quite a coup when one considers that the next longest colonial railway in China was the French-built Chemins de fer de l’Indochine et du Yunnan, which ran for 855km, from the Vietnamese port of Haiphong to Kunming in Yunnan province.

But Russia was on a roll, and a single railway line did not satisfy its ambitions. In 1897, Russia had seized parts of the Liaodong peninsula, arguing that it was protecting China from German expansion.

After some diplomatic wrangling, in July 1898, the Chinese were strong-armed into agreeing to the construction of a branch line, the South Manchuria Railway, which would cut through a far more populous stretch of land, from Harbin through Changchun and down to the ice-free ports of Dalian and Lushan (Port Arthur), the latter of which was envisioned as a potential northern Hong Kong at the time.

Russian railway engineers then made some serious inroads into Chinese territory, cutting off a big “slice of the melon” in Manchuria for the tsar.

For the Chinese, however, Beijing’s entente with St Petersburg had been a disaster. As Paine puts it, “within two years of Russo-Chinese alliance, Russia had taken the territory from China that the alliance was supposed to protect”.

Russia’s progress might have been prodigious but it had laid both the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchuria Railway across the tectonic plates of turn-of-the-century geopolitics.

As trains began rolling from Europe to Asia on the world’s longest railway, sabres soon started to rattle just across the sea.

The Japanese were infuriated by the audaciousness of the Bear’s march down the Liaodong, which they still considered their sphere of influence. On February 8, 1904, Japan made its move with a characteristic surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, and the Russians soon found themselves outgunned.

Despite their massive investment in Manchuria railways, many sections of the tracks damaged by the Boxers were yet to be repaired, which meant they could transport only 20,000 to 40,000 men to the front each month.

Like the Sino-Japanese war before it, the Russo-Japanese war would last just a year but prove bloody. More than 80,000 Japanese troops were killed. But despite these losses, the Japanese emerged victorious. The Russians had to hand over the rights to the Liaodong peninsula, while Japan gloated about being the first Asian power to overcome a European one.

Imperial Russia was forced to count the cost of both a railway and a war that never made a rouble. Japan, however, now had a foothold on the Chinese mainland and was determined to make its gambit a profitable one.

It quickly built on its gains by setting up the South Manchuria Railway Company in 1906, a commercial, semi-governmental organisation somewhat similar to the East India Company that had seized large parts of Asia for the British.

The South Manchuria Railway Company essentially managed a 700km urbanised transport corridor from Dalian to Changchun, and it soon branched out. In 1911, a railway line was constructed from Shenyang to Andong on the Yalu River, which connected with Japan’s colonial railway network in Korea.

Harbours, schools, hospitals, restaurants and hotels were also constructed, as well as coal mines such as the Fushun Colliery, which fuelled Japanese steamships, power plants and steam locomotives. By the 1920s, an iron works at Anshan was fully operational.

By all accounts, Japan’s railway imperialism was paying off.

While the South Manchuria Railway Company expanded its grip, political tumult saw the Chinese Eastern Railway change hands like a low-denomination note at a market.

Maintained by the Russians until civil war spread across China, the Chinese Eastern Railway was next administered by an American as part of the Inter-Allied Commission.

By 1923 the Chinese, in cahoots with White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks, assumed de facto control of the tracks until the Soviets intervened, signing a deal to administer the Chinese Eastern Railway jointly with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime headquartered in Nanjing.

In 1929, the Chinese pushed north and seized the railway outright, but the Soviets intervened militarily, bizarrely with support from the Japanese, who, never feeling fully secure on their sliver of mainland China, maintained a heavy military presence along their railway zone.

This was the infamous Kwantung Army that during the 1920s had developed something of a client relationship with Zhang Zuolin, the dominant Chinese warlord in the region. Zhang’s power was fading, however, and with it, his usefulness.

Japanese militarists sensed a resurgent Kuomintang led by Chiang, in collaboration with the Soviet Union, could suffocate Japanese influence in Manchuria and acted with a pre-emptive strike.

The Huanggutun incident of 1928 saw Kwantung officers blow up Zhang’s train as it rolled back to Shenyang from Beijing, killing the warlord. Unfortunately for the Japanese, his son, Zhang Xueliang, proved to be an adept leader with strong Nationalist sympathies. This provoked Japanese hardliners to act again.

The Mukden incident and annexation of Manchuria followed.

In 1935, concerned that the Japanese might stage another incident that could provoke war with the USSR, the Russians sold the Chinese Eastern Railway for a fraction of its worth to the Japanese.

Control of the railway was not just useful to the Japanese but symbolic, as Japan now controlled a metal line marking Japanese dominance in Manchukuo.

The Manchurian railways set the stage for World War II in the Pacific, which would last a further eight years and cost millions of lives. Japan would dominate and develop northeast Asia until its surrender to the United States in 1945, after which it was forced to relinquish all overseas territories beyond the home islands, and recall its settlers.

Communist victory over Nationalist forces in 1949 saw old Manchuria incorporated into the new People’s Republic of China as simply Dongbei, the northeast.

The region initially prospered as the USSR assisted China in developing heavy industry there. But after the Sino-Soviet split of 1961, and particularly since the reform era, northeast China’s significance has waned.

Having failed to keep up with the southern manufacturing hubs that have fuelled China’s rise, it is now one of mainland China’s worst-performing economic regions, plagued by corruption and cursed by a frigid climate.

Manchuria may no longer be the hotly contested piece of real estate it once was, but this has not stopped Beijing wiring it to its expansive high-speed railway network. Russified Harbin was connected to Beijing in early 2022 as part of the world’s longest high-speed rail corridor, which stretches all the way to its southern terminus, West Kowloon in Hong Kong.

Like the colonial British-built structures found between Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, cities such as Shenyang and Harbin are still dotted with fine Japanese and Russian station houses, villas, banks and churches.

Embedded in the bricks of these heritage buildings, however, are hard lessons about what railway power implies when you are not in control of the tracks.

China’s 20th and 21st century railway boom, when seen in this context, alludes to the understanding that railways are not just a means of public transport, or agents of economic development, but the bones and sinews of the national village, the contour lines of sovereignty – and that those with railway power can influence the course of history.