The article offers a comprehensive analysis of I.A. Shatrov’s waltz On the Hills of Manchuria (1906) in the poetic version by S.G. Petrov (Skitalets), interpreting it as a representative example of the ‘Manchurian text’, a unique cultural phenomenon in the Russian Far East of the early twentieth century. The study focuses on the profound and organic synthesis of musical and verbal semiotics, which reveals how the traumatic historical experience of the Russo-Japanese War is transformed into a nostalgic myth of a lost homeland. The intermedial analysis identifies structural and semantic correspondences between the triple meter of the waltz and the rhythmic organization of the poetic text, as well as between melodic figures and a system of leitmotifs (nostalgia, sacrifice, nature, memory) that shape the work’s mythopoetic structure. Of particular scholarly significance is the revealed isomorphism between descending melodic lines and the motif of tears, along with the analysis of the use of the minor mode, which together demonstrate the depth of the interpenetration of musical and verbal components. The findings substantially enrich current understanding of the genesis of cultural identity under frontier conditions and open new perspectives for interdisciplinary studies of the artistic texts of the Russian Far Eastern diaspora, particularly in relation to the acoustic landscapes of border territories.