"One after another, the peoples of Eurasia were subjugated; indeed, by 1900 non-Russians accounted for more than half of the population of the Tsar's domains. In 1858, capitalizing on Britain's victory over China in the Second Opium War and the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, Russia had seized Chinese territory north of the Amur River; China was also forced to cede the land between the Ussuri River and the Sea of Japan. It was here that the Russians built their principal Pacific port, Vladivostok - 'ruler of the east'. Perhaps nothing symbolized Russian power in Asia more strikingly than the vast Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs six thousand miles from Moscow to Vladivostok, passing through Yaroslavl on the Volga, Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, before finally reaching the Pacific coast just north of the Korean peninsula. By the turn of the century it was all but complete; work had begun on the final stretch of line, across Manchuria to Vladivostok, in 1897. By dramatically reducing journey times between European and Asiatic Russia - from a matter of years to a matter of days - the railway greatly accelerated the Russian colonization of Central and East Asia. Between 1907 and 1914, no fewer than 2.5 million Russians made new lives for themselves in Siberia, the great northern strip of Asia that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific."