Honghuzi () were armed Chinese robbers and bandits who operated in the areas of the eastern Russia-China borderland during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Their activities extended over southeastern Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Manchuria/Northeast China. The word honghuzi has been variously transliterated as hong huzi, hong hu zi, hunghutze, hun-hutze, etc. There is also a common transliteration from Russian, khunkhuzy (), and a back-formation for the singular, khunkhuz (). Korean immigrants to Manchuria in the 20th century called the honghuzi ma-jeok (마적,馬賊). Groups of honghuzi were recruited as guerrillas by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 into chunchu sabotage units.
Resistance to foreign occupation
Near the end the 19th century the honghuzi harassed Russian efforts to build the Manchurian Railway and in general plagued the Russian troops in Manchuria. The Honghuzi participated in the Boxer Rebellion against the Eight-Nation Alliance, and after the Russian invasion of Manchuria carried on guerrilla warfare against the Russian occupation. The origin of most Honghuzi was China proper. Many Honghuzi were former Chinese soldiers or unemployed laborers.
Boxer Rebellion
Louis Livingston Seaman wrote about an incident in which the Honghuzi, who were also Boxers, ambushed, tortured and executed an Eight-Nation Alliance force consisting of Sikhs: In January 1900, during the Boxer campaign (and the Hunghutzes were all Boxers in those days) I chanced to be on the Great Wall of China at Shan-HaiKwan, when a party of five Sikhs, with two coolies and a cart, went through a gateway on a foraging expedition for wood. Shortly after one of the coolies rushed back, so frightened he could hardly articulate, and reported that a party of mounted Hung-hutzes had swooped down on the Sikhs, who had carelessly neglected to take their arms, and had carried them off and stolen their ponies. The coolies had escaped by hiding in a nearby nullah.
It was "boots and saddles," and in less time than one can write it, the Royal Bengal Lancers, Beluchis, and Gurkas were swarming over the hills in a vain hunt for their comrades and the Boxers. But they were late. Several hours after, they came upon the scene of torture. All was over. There remained only the mutilated remains of their companions and the inhuman instrument that had accomplished its deadly work.
The death instrument was a sort of iron cage, about eight feet high, made of rods fastened to a small ring at the base, resembling somewhat the steel frame of an umbrella on an enlarged scale. The rods were closed round the victim much as they are round the handle of a closed umbrella, and a rudely constructed nut or screw at the top forced them tightly together. In this infernal device the unfortunate Sikhs had been forced, one after another, and as the screw was tightened and the flesh of the victim protruded between the bars, these fiends had sliced it off with their swords until the end came, and it came quickly. The Honghuzi also participated in the battle of Blagoveshchensk, where the Russians carried out a massacre of Chinese civilians.
Resistance to the Russian Empire
Many parts of the country were infested by the Honghuzi.
The term Hong huzi itself may have originally been applied during the 1600s to the Russians by the Chinese, since it meant "red bearded". Indigenous peoples of Amur were attacked by these Russian red beards, but the name was later changed to apply to Chinese bandits only.
Honghuzi raided Russian settlers in the Far East region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one incident, the Honghuzi attacked the Heeck family, kidnapping Fridolf Heeck's son and killing his servant and wife in 1879.
The war-correspondent Douglas Story mentioned an incident where one Honghuzi killed several Russian Cossacks before succumbing to return fire: "I have seen a solitary Hunghutze, pursued by a Cossack patrol, calmly dismount from his pony and engage an entire sotnia with his solitary rifle. Kneeling in a field of kiaolang stubble, alone and unsupported, he deliberately picked off the men with his Mauser until the Russians pulled themselves sufficiently together to end his sharp-shooting with a volley."
