[1] The earliest known Russian estimate (1859) gives the population of Qing subjects in the "Trans-Zeya District" as 3,000, without breakdown by ethnicity; the next one (1870) gives it as 10,646, including 5,400 Han, 4,500 Manchus and 1,000 Daurs.

During the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Qing forces attempted to blockade Russian boat traffic on the Amur near Aigun, starting from 16 July, and attacked Blagoveshchensk along with Chinese Honghuzi bandits.

[10] In response to these attacks the military governor of the Amur region, Lieutenant-General Konstantin Nikolaevich Gribskii, ordered the expulsion of all Qing subjects who remained north of the river.

[1] This included the residents of the villages, and Chinese traders and workers who lived in Blagoveshchensk proper, where they numbered anywhere between one-sixth and one-half of the local population of 30,000.

He still remembers the massacre at Blagovestchensk when nearly 8,000 unarmed men, women, and children were driven at the point of the bayonet into the raging Amur, until—as one of the Russian officers who participated in that brutal murder told me at Chin-Wang-Tao in 1900—" the execution of my orders made me almost sick, for it seemed as though I could have walked across the river on the bodies of the floating dead."