Lushun [Lu Shun / Port Arthur]
38°48'N 121°15'E

Lushun in Liaoning Province is the site of a major submarine base, a naval base and shipyard, and a naval and port facility. Situated at the southwest end of the Kuan-tung Peninsula, facing the Korea Bay, Lushun is located at a strategic position between the Bohai Straits and the Miaodao and Penglai Cape of Shandong Province. It is considered the "door to Beijing and Tianjin", protecting China's capital city and the major industrial port.

The "city of the Navy," Lushun ranks first among other naval facilities in terms of military strength. State-of-the-art naval equipment was allocated to this base, including the latest submarines, destroyers, escort vessels, minesweepers, minelayers, and submarine-chasers. The naval air arm ensured the air defence system for the base. The Chinese submarine corps began in April 1951, when a 275-person submarine study team was formed as the Lushun Submarine Detachment under the Pacific Fleet of the Soviet Navy. According to some reports, China's nuclear attack submarines are stationed at Lushun Harbor. By the late 1960s this installation had emerged as one of China's three major submarine bases. China has apparently been working on an aircraft carrier program since the early 1980s, and as part of this effort a F-8 Chinese fighter was reportedly shot off of a steam catapult at the Lushun naval base in 1987.

Lushun is well known at Naval Port and the song "the Night of Naval Port" was very popular all the country. Lushun is a military city, but her representative work is Naval Port Park. It was said 90 percent visitors who toured in Lushun had visited Naval Port Park. They all took a photo as a memento represented the visit to Lushun. Dalian is known under a jumble of names -- Dalny, Dairen, Lushun, and Luda. Lushun is the part further south (formerly Port Arthur, now a naval base), and Lushun and Dalian comprise Luda.

In the late 19th century the imperialist powers carved up China, and Japan gained the Liaoning Peninsula under an 1895 treaty (after defeating the Chinese fleet off Port Arthur in 1894). Russia gained the support of the French and Germans, and managed to get the Japanese to withdraw from Dalian. A year after the first Chinese-Japanese war (1894-95), Czar Nicholas II obtained from the Manchu regime a concession to build a railway from Nerchinsk across Manchuria to Vladivostok. Two years later, in 1898, Russia secured the right to construct a railway from Port Arthur and Dairen northward to Mukden, Changchun, and Harbin.

The Russians received the area as a concession in 1898, and constructed a warm-water port [as opposed to the only partially ice-free port of Vladivostok]. On December 22, 1897, the Russian Government obtained permission for its naval squadron to winter at Port Arthur, on the Liaotung Peninsula, which it had, with Germany and France, in 1895, required Japan to abandon. On March 27, 1898, an agreement was signed by the Chinese Government by which Port Arthur and the adjacent port of Talienwan were leased for a term of twenty-five years to the Russian Government, the lease to be subsequently extended by mutual agreement. This lease included 800 square miles of territory and all harbors between Port Arthur and Talienwan, the harbor of Port Arthur and a part of Talienwan to be for the sole use of Russian and Chinese men-of-war, Russia to have the privilege of extending its trans-Siberian railroad line through Manchuria to Port Arthur and Talienwan and to protect the same, during and after its construction, by Russian troops.

The Japanese made a comeback, sinking the Russian East Asia naval squadron in 1902 and destroying the Russian Baltic squadron in the battle of Tsushima off Korea in 1905. Dalian passed back into Japanese hands, and the Japanese completed the port facilities in 1930.

In 1945, the Soviet Union reoccupied Dalian as a part of the Yalta Agreement in 1945. The 14 August 1945 treaty of friendship and alliance between China and Russia was in a sense a continuation and an implementation of the Sino-Soviet treaty of non-aggression of 1937. The Government of the U.S.S.R. had always recognized the National Government under President Chiang Kai-shek as the only Government of the Republic of China.

Port Arthur was to be a Sino-Soviet naval base, Dairen a free port, in the years between 1945 and 1975, according to the agreements between China and Russia. Both cities are located in the southern end of the Liaotung Peninsula, the historic cradle of many a conflict between China, Russia, and Japan. The underlying principle of these agreements is that Port Arthur and Dairen are both Chinese cities and they are indisputably under Chinese sovereignty. The turning of Port Arthur into a joint naval base is to strengthen the alliance of China and Russia against futur. Japanese aggression, and that of Dairen into a free port to facilitate the transit of goods into the Soviet Uivon from the Pacific Ocean and vice versa. These are arrangements to bring about close military and economic cooperation between the two allies, and they are not meant to prejudice Chinese sovereignty.

The Government of China agreed to make Port Arthur "a purely naval base at the disposal of the battleships and merchant ships of China and the U.S.S.R. alone." The aim of this agreement was "the strengthening of the security of China and Russia and the preventing of future aggression by Japan." A Sino-Soviet military commission was established, which would decide on questions of the joint use of the base. The commission consisted of three Russians and two Chinese, the chairman to be a Russian, the vice-chairman Chinese. The defense of the naval base was given the Soviet GovernT ment by the Chinese Government. The Soviet Government will establish the necessary equipment of the base; it had the right to maintain army, naval, and air forces in certain points in the area; and it has the responsibility of establishing and maintaining lighthouses, signals, and other navigation facilities.

In December 1949 Mao Tzetung and Zhou Enlai led a delegation to Moscow, which among other matters raised the issue of recovering Lushun. The resulting Sino-Soviet "Joint Communique Concerning the Issue of Lushun Naval Base" called for a Soviet withdrawal and transfer of facilities to the PRC by 31 May 1955.

Lushun Navy Weapons Museum displays include navy weaponry over 1000 pieces in more than 600 types of designed and manufactured by China. The exhibitions are both indoor and outdoor. The indoor exhibitions have 6 showrooms. The marine-weapons showroom exhibits all kinds of submarine mine, deep-water bombs and mine sweeping equipment. There are also other showrooms, such as ship-to-ship missile showroom, field-glasses and submarine periscope showrooms, light weapons, torpedo, other kinds of ammunition and land mine showrooms; naval vessels models, world-famous guns showrooms and the showroom of Chinese naval uniforms throughout history. The large-scale outdoor exhibitions, designed and manufactured by China, include torpedo boats, land tanks, Hongqi land-air missile, Haiying shore warship missile, naval helicopter, fighter plane, sea radar, shore cannon, and antiaircraft guns.

According to declassified photo interpretation report from 1963, depths in Lushun's outer harbor ranged from 4 to 20 fathoms while the fairway to the inner harbor had an approximate depth of 28 feet. The quayed eastern bay in the inner harbor had a dredged depth of from 19 to 27 feet and the western part of the inner harbor had depths of from 16 to 33 feet.

The submarine base is located on the southwest peninsula. In 1963 its facilities included three floating piers, one small finger pier, one revetted explosives storage building, two heating plants, six multistory buildings that are probable barracks. There were also six single-story barracks, one revetted U-shaped bunker (that appeared to be unused), three administration-type buildings, one POL storage tank partially underground and numerous additional support buildings.

The naval base and shipyard are located on the northeast end of Lushun. The facility was capable of performing major reparis on any vessel in the Chinese inventory (in 1963), including submarines. This yard also constructed at least one Haikou PGM.

Collocated with the shipyard was a motor torpedo boat base that supported P-4 and P-7 PT's and a small patrol boat facility supporting YP's. Lushun was the the homeport of the entire inventory of the OSA and Komar units known to have been in the PLAN inventory in 1963. Facilities included one large and one small graving dock, one large and two small marine railways and six quays, two cranes along the large graving dock, one large floating crane, three verticle POL tanks, seven medium horizontal POL tanks, eight fabrication-type buildings, two probable foundries, and numerous support buildings. The patrol facility was located outside the maine base and has a floating pier, three small quays, and seven small support buildings.

A Central Intelligence Agency National Intelligence Survey from 1958 indicated that Lushun had sixteen wharves with 6,600 linerar feet of wharfage. The largest ship that could be docked in the shipyard drydock was 534 feet in length. There were 27 material storage buildings with a total gross floow area of 104,000 square feet, 2 acres of coal storage, 2 petroleum storage areas with 4 tanks with total capacity 270,000 bbl and 12 tanks of an undertermined capacity. Lushun was also believed to have at least 2 radio stations and a signal station.

In 1945, the Soviet union, the United States and Britain signed "Yalta Agreement" requiring that Dalian be turned into an international commercial port, and the Port of Lushun to be given to the Soviet Union as a Far East naval base. Afterwards the PRC and the Soviet Union signed "Sino-Russia Friendship Alliance Treaty", "Sino-Russia Agreement on Dalian Affairs" and "Sino-Russia Agreement on Lushun Affairs". On August 15,1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered and subsequently Dalian and Lushun were free from colonial reign.

According to "Yalta Agreement" and those documents signed by the China and Soviet Union, the Soviet military withdrew from Dalian on May 26, 1955.

After liberation, Dalian and Lushun remained as two separate cities and later combined into the City of Luda. In 1981, Dalian replaced Luda as the name of the city.

By the year 2000, high resolution imagery was available from two sources, including declassified CORONA imagery. As of 01 May 2001 Russian 2-meter resolution KVR-1000 imagery coverage was not available via the SPIN-2 service on TerraServer. As of 01 May 2001 archival Space Imaging IKONOS 1-meter imagery available on the CARTERRAT Archive includes 3 scenes of this area, all with very heavy cloud cover.