Once part of Tsar Alexander III’s plan to better link Russia’s Pacific coast with the capital for economic, cultural, and defensive reasons, the Trans-Manchurian Railroad has now become a unique and unforgettable tourism experience. The dream of Alexander (and later his son, Nicholas II) created a railway that today links the Far East with Moscow and provides tourists traveling from China with a weekly Beijing to Moscow train that can shuttle them in a mere 6 days to Russia’s capital city.

The History
For most of Russian history, Siberia had been a vast and distant wilderness. Though it had plentiful resources, it had largely been inaccessible, and though it offered an immense land area, it had always been sparsely populated. The idea of accessing the resources of this region as Russia moved into the 20th Century – as well as the vulnerability of Russia’s eastern reaches to the European powers …