South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu)

The South Manchuria Railway Company (南満洲鉄道株式会社, commonly known as 満鉄/Mantetsu) was established in 1906 following Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War, under which the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) transferred the Russian railway between Changchun and Port Arthur and its attached rights to Japan. Created by imperial ordinance in June and founded on November 26, 1906, it was capitalized at 200 million yen with half funded by the Japanese government in kind, and operated as a semi-governmental national policy company (国策会社). Its first president was Gotō Shinpei, formerly civil administrator of Taiwan, who advocated "military preparedness in civil dress" — colonial management through railways, urban development and research. The head office moved from Tokyo to Dalian in 1907 and operations began on April 1.

Headquartered in Dalian with a secondary office in Xinjing (Changchun), Mantetsu initially managed over 1,100 km of railways, together with the Fushun and Yantai coal mines, the ports of Dalian and Yingkou, the Anshan ironworks, the Yamato Hotel chain, hospitals and schools, and had 72 subsidiary companies by 1938. In the Railway Zone along its lines it exercised administrative, taxing and educational powers. Its Research Department, founded in 1907, was one of the largest intelligence-gathering organizations in the world.

On September 18, 1931 the Kwantung Army blew up a section of Mantetsu track at Liutiaohu near Mukden as a pretext for the Manchurian Incident, and Manchukuo was founded the next year. Mantetsu was then entrusted with Manchukuo's state railways and in 1935 took over the North Manchuria Railway bought from the Soviet Union; the Asia Express, running between Dalian and Xinjing from 1934, symbolised its engineering. Under the controlled economy directed by the Kwantung Army, however, its heavy industries were transferred in 1937 to Ayukawa Yoshisuke's Manchuria Heavy Industries, and the Railway Zone's administration passed to Manchukuo the same year. Matsuoka Yōsuke was president from 1935 to 1939. In 1942–43 many Research Department staff were arrested by the Kwantung Kempeitai as suspected leftists.

At its peak Mantetsu operated about 10,000 km of line and is said to have had some 400,000 employees, most of them Chinese, with marked disparities in pay and rank between Japanese and Chinese staff. After the Soviet Union entered the war in August 1945 its facilities were occupied by Soviet forces. It was dissolved by order of the American occupation authorities in September 1945 after Japan's defeat; its lines passed to the Sino-Soviet Chinese Changchun Railway and liquidation was completed in 1957. Mantetsu offices, stations and Yamato Hotels survive in Dalian, Shenyang and Changchun.