Name: Why The World's Most Segregated Metro Exists
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T16:57:47.000Z
Duration: 24 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is a map that's focused over an urban metropolitan area.

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While you've probably never seen this specific area before, it looks like just about any other metro area anywhere else in the world.

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With two distinctive urban cores separated from one another by a river that keeps them fewer than 600 meters apart, connected over the river by a bridge.

But this urban area is probably the most unique and bizarre one that you can find anywhere in the world because of how radically different the culture, architecture, and most of all, people are on either side of this river in the two different urban cores.

On the north side of the river live around 241,000 people and an overwhelming 97% of them are all ethnically white or European in origin.

While over on the south side of the river live around another 224,000 more people, but 99% of them are ethnically East Asian in origin.

Creating what is almost certainly the most starkly segregated and ethnically culturally divided major urban area that can be found anywhere on the planet today.

To the north of the river is the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk, while to the south of the river is the Chinese city of Heihe.

There are a handful of other major urban areas in the world like this that are divided between two different countries.

There's Detroit and Windsor divided between the U.S. and Canada, while on the other side of the border there's San Diego and Tijuana and El Paso and Juarez divided between the U.S. and Mexico.

In Europe, the closest comparison to this would be Copenhagen and Malmo in Denmark and Sweden separated by the Oresund but connected by bridge.

While in Africa there's Kinshasa and Brazzaville between the DRC and the Republic of the Congo, and on the island of Cyprus, the island's biggest city, Nicosia, is militarily divided between the Republic of Cyprus and the mostly unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

However, crossing between any of these urban areas from one side to the other does not involve anywhere near as stark of a change in people, culture, history, and architecture as the over the Amir River involves.

The Amir River itself, despite being almost completely unknown in the western world, is the 10th longest river on the planet and runs for longer than the Indus does.

Part of why it's probably so little known in the rest of the world is because for almost its entire length, it runs through some of the most sparsely populated empty land on the planet across the harsh inhospitable frontier between China and Russia.

Despite its great length, the only two settlements of any notable size along the Amir while it makes up the international border are Blagoveshchensk and Hayha, immediately opposite of each other.

An island of two radically different civilizations facing each other off across the river surrounded by absolutely nothing else, for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.

It is one of the most bizarre borders in the world today, where when you drive across the only bridge between them, the culture immediately and radically shifts from a dated city that wouldn't feel out of place in Eastern Europe, to a more modern, vibrant East Asian Chinese city.

From an Indo-European language to a Sino-Tibetan language.

From everyone looking like white Islamic people, to everybody looking like East Asian Chinese people.

And to understand how this unique demographic border situation came to be today, you need to understand how this region's unique, bizarre, violent, and little-known history and geography shaped it that way.

For most of history, the Amir River Valley was always on the remote frontiers of human civilization and was sparsely inhabited.

The indigenous people who lived in the modern-day area of Blagoveshchensk and Hayha were known as the Duchers.

But they only numbered around 14,000 total people in the 1650s, when the region began simultaneously coming under the influence of the Qing Dynasty in China and the Tsardom of Russia.

Explorers and settlers coming from both empires began clashing with each other at the undefined boundaries of the region.

But neither side put a great deal of effort into the conflict due to the geographic limitations of the Amir River itself.

Even though it is the 10th longest river in the world, it forms an incredibly poor navigable link from the interior to the Pacific Ocean.

It freezes over for half of the year, and then even during the other half of the year, when it's flowing, it's chock-full of tiny islands and sandbars that make navigating through it extremely difficult.

Nonetheless, small-scale conflict between the Russians and Chinese at the frontiers of their growing empires continued in the region for decades, until they came together to properly define their borders in 1689 with the Treaty of Nershinsk.

The first treaty between the Russians and Chinese in history that notably gave nearly all of the land in the entire Amir River Valley to the Qing, including modern-day Oshinsk.

This whole area between the Amir and Ussuri rivers in the south and the settled border in the north, all under the Qing's administration, came to be called by them as Outer Manchuria, and it basically remained a sparsely populated backwater of their empire with not much really going on for the next one and a half centuries.

However, by the time of the mid-19th century, the Qing empire was beginning to crumble, beset by multiple foundation-shattering crises.

Britain's decisive defeat of the Qing during the First Opium War by 1842 led to the Qing being forced into ceding away their control of Hong Kong.

While in the 1850s, an enormous rebellion exploded across China that threw the entire country into a catastrophic civil war.

The 14-year-long Taiping Rebellion, as it would come to be called, would prove to become the bloodiest civil war ever fought in human history, and the biggest conflict of the whole 19th century worldwide, killing around the same number of people as the whole First World War, but all entirely contained just within China, which severely shook the foundations of the Qing state.

As the Qing were distracted by the scale of the rebellion, the British and French attacked the Qing again at the same time in 1856, sparking the Second Opium War.

And then, smelling blood in the water, the Russians lined up tens of thousands of soldiers along the 1689 Treaty of Nershinsk border, and once it became clear that China was losing against Britain and France, the Russians threatened to invade and trigger a third war for the Qing state to have to worry about.

Without the resources to fight back, the Qing, under enormous duress, signed the 1858 Treaty of Aegon, ceding away all of their land to the north of the Emir River over to Russia.

And then two years later in 1860, after the British and French defeated the Qing again, they forced the Qing into ceding away all of their land to the east of the Emir and Yusuri Rivers as well, essentially establishing the modern day border between Russia and China that blocked China off from having any direct access to the Sea of Japan.

With these two treaties, the Qing were forced into ceding away more than 600,000 square kilometers of land in outer Manchuria to Russia, an area of land roughly equivalent to Ukraine that included the locations of what would soon become several major Far Eastern Russian cities, like Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and of course, Blagoveshchensk, which was founded as a Russian city almost immediately as the annexation took place in 1858 at the confluence of the Emir and Zeya Rivers.

As the border shifted though, thousands of ethnically Chinese former Qing subjects remained over on the other, now Russian, side of the river.

As the rest of the 19th century progressed, a gold rush in the area led to a surge in settlers from the European side of the Russian Empire that was encouraged by the Tsarist authorities to populate their side of the border with Slavs, which led to Blagoveshchensk population soaring from practically nothing in 1850 to around 40,000 people just by the end of the century, while the Chinese side remained a sparsely populated backwater.

However, by that time, the growing resentment and anger within China towards the outside imperialist powers who had conquered and carved up their lands was reaching a boiling point.

By this time, the Russians had forcibly overrun outer Manchuria, the British had forcibly taken over Hong Kong, the French had booted out all Chinese influence from Vietnam, and most recently, the Japanese had forcibly kicked Chinese influence out of Korea and taken over Taiwan.

All of these decades of humiliations and territorial setbacks in China eventually culminated with the explosion of the Boxer Rebellion in Northern China in 1899, an uprising that involved hundreds of thousands of armed and pissed off Chinese peasants who sought to drive foreign influence out of the country and reverse the previous decades of territorial losses, humiliations, and defeats.

The Boxer Rebellion greatly alarmed the Russians and exacerbated their long-held anxieties over their much smaller population than the Chinese.

In the lands, they effectively stole from China only 40 years previously.

There was always a fear among the Russian settlers in the region that the far more demographically numerous Chinese would eventually come back around to try and reclaim these lands.

And that anxiety reached a fever pitch over the summer of 1900, when the Boxer militias of the Qing Imperial Army moved north and began attacking Russian communities along the Emir River, culminating with their artillery shelling of Blagoveshchensk itself in July of 1900.

The thousands of ethnically Chinese former Qing subjects within the city at the time still numbered between one-sixth and one-half of the total population, and the local Russian government began viewing them all as a disloyal fifth column in the chaos.

So, on the 3rd of July in 1900, the Russian military governor of Blagoveshchensk issued the order that the city's entire population of ethnically Chinese residents were to be deported over to China.

But the only way to deport them into China was by pushing them over to the other side of the Emir River.

And the problem at the time was that shipping along the river was non-existent during the conflict, while boats were in extreme short supply as well.

Unbothered by these details, however, the Russian authorities rounded up all of the thousands of Chinese residents in the city, took them down to the banks of the Emir River, and, at gunpoint, ordered them to swim across the river over to China or be shot.

What followed was one of the most catastrophic and lesser-known massacres in all of modern history.

Thousands of the city's Chinese residents were driven into the powerful river and drowned during their doomed effort to cross it, while those who refused were shot, bayoneted, or axed to death right then and there on the shore by the Russian police and the Cossacks.

Very few of them managed to successfully make it over to on the other side.

And by the end of the whole brutal ordeal, four days later, as many as 5,000 of Blagoveshchensk's ethnically Chinese population had been ruthlessly massacred, resulting in the almost complete ethnic cleansing of the city's entire Chinese community.

This was the incredibly violent incident that established the formerly diverse northern side of the Emir River in Blagoveshchensk as an overwhelmingly Russian, East Slav, white community instead that has persisted to this day.

The Boxer Rebellion was eventually crushed and then the two communities separated from each other by the Emir River steadily began evolving in almost complete isolation from each other, with the Chinese side still remaining very sparsely populated and the Russian side continuing to grow due to the nearby Gold Rush.

But both Russia and China would soon enter into periods of enormous calamity that would shape demographic trajectories of this region even further.

The Qing Empire collapsed shortly after the Boxer Rebellion in 1912, while the Russian Empire collapsed not that much longer afterwards in 1917, leading to huge periods of upheaval and strife in both countries that lasted for decades into the 1940s that saw the population of Blagoveshchensk plummet and the development on either side of the border essentially stalling, freezing the new demographic realities following the ethnic cleansing of 1900 in place.

Eventually, the Soviet Union emerged as a united and stabilized state by 1945, while the People's Republic of China emerged as a mostly united and stabilized state by 1949, beginning a new era of suddenly friendly relations between the world's two largest communist states.

While the Chinese community in Blagoveshchensk on the Russian side of the border was almost completely annihilated in 1900, there was also a relatively large Russian population that had been established over on the Chinese side of the border as well, with more than a hundred thousand ethnic Russians who lived across Manchuria at the time, who were largely descendants of railway workers and white emigres who had been there for decades.

The friendly relations between the Soviet Union and communist China in the 1950s led to the Soviet Union announcing a right of return for all of these Russians in Manchuria in 1954, which led to virtually all of the Manchurian Russians repatriating themselves to the Soviet Union by 1962, similarly solidifying the overwhelming Chinese demographic on the southern side of the Amur River in the process.

Despite this era of warm relations, however, no bridges or other infrastructure links were ever built across the Amur River connecting China to the Soviet Union over it directly, which limited contact between both sides of the river and continued leading to both sides evolving in separate demographic directions.

And as it turned out, this historically unique era of friendly relations between Russia and China was not destined to last for very long, and the two would return back to their historic animosity very quickly.

In the 1960s, the Soviet and Chinese relationship rapidly deteriorated over their differing interpretations of Marxism, which led to the border between Blagoveshchensk and China being sealed off in 1960, along with the entire Sino-Soviet border getting sealed off only a couple years later in 1962.

A few years later in 1969, hundreds of Chinese and Soviet soldiers were killed fighting against each other over a series of border disputes further downstream the Amur River as Mao Zedong began referring to the 1858 Treaty of Aegon and the 1860 Treaty of Peking as unequal treaties that had resulted from Russian imperialism and colonialism, reviving the same kind of latent anxieties and fears within the Russians over China's demographic superiority in the region and their potential long-term intentions on retaking what had used to be Chinese territory across outer Manchuria.

Because of this conflict and the return of these old anxieties, the border between the Soviet Union and China, and by extension between Blagoveshchensk and China, remain completely sealed off and highly militarized for nearly 30 years between 1960 and 1989, once again keeping the two sides of the river hermetically sealed off from one another for political reasons on top of geographic reasons, continuing the century-plus long trend now of the two sides' demographies developing in almost complete isolation despite them being located so nearby to one another.

By 1980, China was being led by Deng Xiaoping and he was beginning to lead the country in a different, more open direction.

As a part of his plan to pave the way toward a broader reopening with the outside world and the Soviet Union, Deng oversaw the founding of the city of Heihe directly opposite Blagoveshchensk in 1980 to encourage development in what had always been a remote frontier region of the country.

By 1989, relations between China and the Soviets had warmed back up enough that the two sides finally agreed to reopen their border again, and Heihe's strategic location as the only built-up urban area along the entire border region on the Chinese side made it an invaluable logistics center for the reopening of Sino-Soviet trade.

Following the Soviet Union's collapse only a couple years later in 1991 and the establishment of the new Russian Federation in its place, trade between Blagoveshchensk and Heihe finally began really booming, as Russian merchants began taking advantage of the significantly cheaper goods immediately across the border.

A sort of regional economic boom began and Heihe's population finally began surging, growing to more than 110,000 residents by the end of the decade in 2000, compared to around 219,000 residents who were at that time across the river in Blagoveshchensk.

But there still didn't exist any direct physical infrastructure links between the two cities despite their geographic proximity.

The only ways to get across the river between them were still limited to either taking ferries over the summer or temporary roads built across the ice over the winter, which continued placing limits on the amount of trade and cross-border travel that possible.

Russia continued preferring this for now however, acutely aware of their own weakness following the Soviet collapse and still deeply anxious over China's enormous population across the border and potentially latent claims to the outer Manchuria region.

The border disputes here along the Amur River that had nearly erupted in war between the Soviets and Chinese in the late 1960s wouldn't end up being settled by treaty all the way until 2004.

And before and even after that, Russia saw it fit to continue limiting access from China into the Far East by maintaining their geographic defenses along the Amur River without any bridges or other infrastructure built across it.

Eventually though, things started changing Russia's mind, owing to China's rapid economic growth making it a more valuable trading partner and especially after Russia seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 that led to a deluge of sanctions against them by the Western world.

Beginning the modern era of sharp confrontation between Russia and the West, the Russians began seeing pivoting away from Europe towards China as increasingly within their own national interest.

And that paved the way for the two sides to finally agree on building a bridge between Blagoveshchensk and Heha across the Amur River in 2016.

Built over the next four years at a cost of 342 million U.S. dollars and stretching for one kilometer, the first ever bridge connecting the two cities with one another directly year round was finally completed only in early 2020.

But its formal opening was almost immediately delayed because of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic shortly afterwards.

Eventually over the summer of 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, the bridge was finally open to freight traffic which dramatically reduced the travel distance of trucked Chinese goods to European Russia by around 1500 kilometers.

Further solidifying Heha and Blagoveshchensk's importance to the overall Sino-Russian relationship.

Roughly 200 freight trucks have been recorded traveling across the bridge every day since then and it was only a few months before I made this video in January of 2025 when the bridge was finally opened up to passenger vehicle traffic as well.

Finally for the first time in centuries offering a way for the Russian and Chinese citizens on either side of this river to easily travel back forth between both sides year round.

Over the time period from Heha's founding as a city by the Chinese immediately opposite of Blagoveshchensk in 1980, it has grown far more rapidly than its Russian twin has.

In the early 1990s, Heha only had around 80,000 residents compared to Blagoveshchensk's 205,000.

By 2024, however, Heha had soared to more than 224,000 residents as Blagoveshchensk had only grown more modestly to about 240,000.

Nearly equalizing the two twin cities completely different populations.

Heha now looks like a modern dense and vibrant Chinese city full of glowing lights that shimmer off of the Amur River at night.

While Blagoveshchensk still appears like it has for decades.

Essentially like any other drab post-Soviet city in Eastern Europe.

The scale of this growth over on the Chinese side of the river can be clearly illustrated by these series of showing the border between Blagoveshchensk and China back in 1969 and then the same location from just a few years ago in the 21st century.

In a way, the extraordinary growth that has taken place in Heha over the past few decades is a sort of microcosm of Russia's centuries-old anxieties and fears along their entire border with China in the Far East.

Today, the entire enormous region of the Far East in Russia makes up about 40% of the entire country's land and is roughly double the geographic size of India.

And yet it is all home to fewer than just 8 million people.