Once a city of Russian colonial dreams, Harbin, in North-East China, had many foreign residents during the first half of the twentieth century: Russians, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, and many other nationals from Tsarist Russia came to Harbin to build and operate the Chinese Eastern Railway. During the Russian Civil War, more émigrés found refuge in the city. Between 1932 and 1945, representatives of diplomatic and business interests from Great Britain, Germany, France, the USA, as well as Korean settlers, and the Japanese who eventually occupied the region and established the puppet empire of Manchukuo, all added to the international texture of the city that was called, at times, the “Paris of the East.”