From the middle of the 19th century till today, as Olga Dyakova pointed out in the Far-Eastern Scientist newspaper, researchers have found more than 150 ancient settlements, fortifications, walls and ramparts in Primorye. The first written information about them, rather extensive, is contained in the sources of China. The southern neighbor collected every possible information about local fortresses and settlements, way of life, traditions, customs, number of inhabitants, front armies, etc. through ambassadors and spies, which was the basis for making reports, maps and news items. Thanks to their scrupulous translations, made in the second half of the 19th century by domestic orientalists, including Nikita Bichurin, corresponding member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences from 1828, we get to know about a ramified network of defensive constructions belonging to Tunguso-Manchurians (tribes of the Altai language macrofamily) living there in the 1st-early 2nd millennia. The close attention to these old fortresses and cities, situated in strategically important points or on plots fit for farming, showed Russian trailblazers, who were sent there by the government to develop the Far-Eastern region and to engage in construction in the 1850s. Military experts and engineers began all-round studies of the territory. First of all, it is necessary to name the discoverer of local fortifications—Mikhail Venyukov, an army officer who arrived there in 1858 to specify the border with China and to describe the Priamurye lands. Devotion to his cause, inquisitiveness, responsibility and competence that he showed during an expedition from the Amur river to the Sea of Japan, deserve deep respect. And his book Travels to Priamurye, China and Japan became a result of his journey. At the same time, the mining engineer and geographer Innokenty Lopatin wrote a "report on 49 ancient natural boundaries in the Amur country" (nowadays it is kept at the Institute of Material Culture Hist ... Читать далее