The most equipped military base in China is located in a provincial town with an unspoken name Lushun, but the world knows this place as Port Arthur.
The harbor on which this port stands, located in the western part of Liaodong Bay, is surrounded on four sides by hills, as if specially designed 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 grouping. Occupied by the Japanese from 1894 to 1895, he was, according to the Shimonosek treaty, rented by them. However, this step was contrary to the interests of Germany, France and Russia, which urgently demanded the return of the peninsula taken by force to China.
Expanding their presence in the East, the Russians even took a number of steps aimed at renting the Liaodong Bay and the peninsula, and there were even cases of offering bribes to Chinese high-ranking 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.
This development did not really like Japan. In February 1904, the Russo-Japanese confrontation began, during which the military command of Russia made a lot of mistakes. And although sailors and ordinary soldiers fought like real heroes, the military department, which was not ready for such an outcome of events, nevertheless lost this war. The reckoning for such a short-distance leadership for Russia was truly terrifying. In addition to material and human losses during the hostilities, she had to agree to shameful conditions. The commissioning of Port Arthur ended with the Portsmouth Treaty, according to which not only the Liaodong Peninsula and the South Manchurian Railway, but also half of Sakhalin departed to Japan.
Russians had to wait for satisfaction for almost four decades.
And only in August 1945, the military forces previously concentrated in the Far East and Transbaikalia were able to start hostilities. The Japanese fiercely resisted, but as soon as our troops managed to break into the Hailar bastion and overcome the impregnable, as the Japanese believed, Big Khingan, the morale of the enemy was broken.
On the twenty-third of August an impressive landing parachuted and seaplanes descended on Port Arthur, the Japanese surrendered the city without a fight.
It was, perhaps, at that time the only operation in its scale that the Russians brilliantly carried out from the beginning to the very end.
In the same year, the USSR concluded a well-known agreement with the Kuomintang government under which Port Arthur was leased to him for thirty whole years. But just a few years later, Chiang Kai-shek fled, and the then leadership of the CPSU, in order not to spoil relations with the fraternal Communist Party in those years, liberated Port Arthur in early 1955, removing all its troops from it.
Port Arthur today is a closed city; foreign citizens are not allowed there. And only at the 203rd height and the Russian cemetery is access still open.