I am also grateful to many others who through the course of my Amur inquiries provided inspiration, leads, insights, encouragement, sound advice, wonderful company, hospitality, and friendship. Perhaps not everyone is aware of the seeds they sowed or of how much help they gave. Thank you, Martha Avery, Baabar, Konstantin Bessmertny, Clive Brill, Bu Ping, Christian Caryl, Simon Cartledge, Aly Clark, Mark Cullen, Charlie Goddard, Alexis Dudden, Edward Gargan, Camilla Hallinan, François Huchet, Amanda Hudson, Katie Howells, Iwashita Akihiro, Tuva Kahrs, Morgan Keay, Jeff Kingston, Leonid Koritny, Kuno Miho, Leo Lewis, Liu Kin-ming, Richard Lloyd Parry, Giles Murray, Ogahara Toshio, Okata Suirei, the late Osawa Eiichiro (who did not ask to spend years in the Russian Far East, but who was generous with his memories of his being a prisoner-of-war there), Osawa Machiko, Veryan Pascoe, Gail Pirkis, Anna Reid, Gwen Robinson, Morris Rossabi, Yvonne Ryan, Ilaria Maria Sala, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Mark Stainer, Sumati Luvsandendev, Boris Voronov, Geoff Wade, Richard Walker, Joan White, Kyle Wilson, Ania Wolek, Cha Wong, Anthony Ziegler, Felicity Ziegler, and, Alba Ziegler-Bailey.
Unbidden, Jonathan Fenby read the manuscript closely, spotted blunders, and suggested helpful improvements. My big thanks.
At The Economist, I am lucky to have the finest colleagues you could wish for. For all their help and insights, their friendship, and for putting up with the disruptions that this project entailed, I would especially like to thank: Edward Carr, Richard Cockett, Kenn Cukier, Ursula Esling, Jayne Ferdinand, Rob Gifford, Kawamura Taeko, Konno Hiroko, Fanny Lau, Simon Long, Edward Lucas, Venetia Longin, John Micklethwait, James Miles, Andy Miller, Miyatake Chika, Arkady Ostrovsky, Ted Plafker, and Henry Tricks.
Thanks, and all my love, to my darling sisters, Harriet Ziegler and Mattie Ziegler, and to my wonderful mother, Beth Hallinan, for providing convivial places to write, and so much else.
Huge thanks to Tina Bennett, my amazing agent. She is exceptional, for helping shape inchoate ideas, for her inspiration, and for being a wellspring of wise counsel. Thank you to Tina’s diligent and supportive assistant at WME, Svetlana Katz. And thank you to Stephanie Koven, who with verve and good spirits has taken this book overseas, as well as thanks to others at Janklow & Nesbit past and present who have been sure to look after me.
At Penguin Press I would like to thank Scott Moyers for first commissioning a book from me with such enthusiasm; Ann Godoff for agreeing to a wild change of course; and, before she moved on, Vanessa Mobley. Thank you also to Annie Badman and Will Carnes for dealing so cheerfully and competently with all the to-and-fro of getting the manuscript away, as well as to Michael Burke for his scrupulous copyediting. And I thank my marvelous editor, Ginny Smith Younce, for taking on this book and for immeasurably improving it. Her commitment, wisdom, insights, and good cheer seemed inexhaustible. When Ginny thanked me for having spared her the journey, I knew there was some sense in having embarked upon it.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following is not intended to be exhaustive but to point to my chief inspirations and sources for the Amur’s story. For a fuller biography, see www.blackdragonriver.com.
To grasp the history of Siberia and the Russian Far East, four books were indispensable: Bruce Lincoln’s The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians, John Stephan’s The Russian Far East: A History, James Forsyth’s A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990, and Mark Bassin’s Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (upon which I drew deeply for the role the Amur played in the nineteenth-century Russian imagination). Older, but engaging, histories include those by George Lensen (Russia’s Eastward Expansion), Yuri Semyonov (Siberia: Its Conquest and Development), and R. K. I. Quested (The Expansion of Russia in East Asia, 1857–1860).
John Man’s biography of Genghis Khan (Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection) was tucked into my del as we rode up to Burkhan Khaldun, and I plundered it as heartily as a Mongol.
For Russo-Chinese border history, I drew on Robert Lee’s The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History. Mark Mancall’s Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 is essential for understanding the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Peter Perdue’s more recent and wholly absorbing China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia puts that treaty, and Qing expansion more generally, in the context of the struggles among the last of Eurasia’s great steppe empires. Pamela Kyle Crossley’s The Manchus was absorbing reading. For the Kangxi emperor, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-Hsi by Jonathan Spence is a small masterpiece.
As for the Decembrists, I drew chiefly upon The First Russian Revolution, 1825 by Anatole Mazour, The Princess of Siberia by Christine Sutherland, The Decembrist Movement by Marc Raeff, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes.
Contemporary accounts enliven and often enlighten any journey of this kind. None is more extraordinary—and more recommended—than the earliest, the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, a cantankerous seventeenth-century schismatic exiled with his family to Siberia and made to join Pashkov’s Daurian expedition. Avvakum’s Life is the founding oeuvre of that very Russian genre, captivity literature, with no successor until Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead. It also contains the earliest—and most emotionally charged—descriptions of Siberia’s natural world.
Engaging travelogues include that of John Dundas Cochrane, the “Pedestrian Traveler,” who in 1816 walked from London to Kamchatka, where he found his bride and returned home. The Amur itself comes into focus with a nineteenth-century trio: Perry McDonough Collins, who proved an enthusiastic travel companion, at least to me; Ernst Ravenstein, who wrote the first history of the river; and Thomas Knox, who knew how to travel lightheartedly.
For an impressive volume that combines, in effect, a railway timetable with an imposing work of geography, ethnography, and history, interlaced with absorbing photogravures, I recommend (though not to buy, unless you are a regular first-class traveler and can afford a rare surviving volume) the Guide to the Great Siberian Railway published by Imperial Russia’s railways ministry.
As for the many ethnographers and naturalists of the Russian Far East in the early twentieth century, Vladimir Arseniev was the greatest. He also comes across as a great humanist. Dersu the Trapper, his barely fictionalized account of a Russian’s relationship with a native hunter, is a classic. Kurosawa later made a film of it, a rare Russo-Japanese venture. I have already made a plea for Berthold Laufer’s The Decorative Art of the Amur Tribes.
A wonderful, and entertaining, modern-day ethnography (though the author might deny it was that) is The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid.
For an up-to-date account of the Amur basin’s natural history and ecology, the Amur-Heilong River Basin Reader by Eugene Simonov of the World Wildlife Fund is unlikely to be surpassed. I also drew on The Birds of Heaven, Peter Matthiessen’s travels with those singular birds, the cranes.
Valentin Rasputin is Eastern Siberia’s contemporary daemon. The only novel set on the Amur that I know of was brought to my attention by Anna Reid: Andrei Makine’s Once upon the River of Love. I can’t say the river itself comes into focus, but it is well worth reading anyway.
Arseniev, Vladimir. 1996. Dersu the Trapper. Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson & Company.
Atkinson, Thomas. 1860. Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, and the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and China, with Adventures Among the Mountain Kirghis and the Manjours, Manyargs, Toungous. New York: Harper.
Avery, Martha. 2003. The Tea Road: China and Russia Meet Across the Steppe. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press.
Avvakum Petrovich, Protopope. 1924. The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum / by Himself; Translated from the Seventeenth Century Russian by Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees; with a Preface by Prince D. S. Mirsky. London: L. and V. Woolf at the Hogarth Pre
ss.
Bassin, Mark. 1999. Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cardenal, Juan Pablo, and Heriberto Araujo. 2013. China’s Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers, and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing’s Image. New York: Crown.
Cochrane, John. 1824. Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey Through Russia and Siberian Tartary, from the Frontiers of China to the Frozen Sea and Kamtchatka Performed During the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, and 1823. Philadelphia; New York: H. C. Carey & I. Lea and A. Small; Collins & Hannay.
Collins, Perry McDonough. 1962. Siberian Journey. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dmitriev-Mamonov, A. I. 1900. Guide to the Great Siberian Railway. Published by the Ministry of Ways of Communication. St. Petersburg: Artistic Printing Society.
Dunscomb, Paul E. 2012. Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1922: “A Great Disobedience Against the People.” Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.
Figes, Orlando. 2014. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Fitzhugh, William. 1988. Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Forsyth, James. 1994. A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Fraser, John. 1902. The Real Siberia, Together with an Account of a Dash Through Manchuria. London; New York: Cassell.
Frazier, Ian. 2010. Travels in Siberia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Golder, Frank. 1960. Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641–1850: An Account of the Earliest and Later Expeditions Made by the Russians Along the Pacific Coast of Asia and North America Including Some Related Expeditions. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith.
Gutman, 1993. The Destruction of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur: An Episode in the Russian Civil War in the Far East, 1920. Kingston, Ont.; Fairbanks, Alaska: Limestone Press.
Hill, Fiona, and Clifford G. Gaddy. 2003. The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Google eBook). Vol. 2003. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Hugo-Bader, Jacek. 2012. White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia. Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint Press.
Jochelson, Waldemar. 1928. Peoples of Asiatic Russia [with plates]. New York: American Museum of Natural History.
Kelly, Aileen. 1998. Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Knox, Thomas. 1871. Overland Through Asia: Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar Life. London: & Co.
Kropotkin, Piotr Alekseevich. 1899. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Lansdell, Henry. 1882. Through Siberia, Volume 1. New York: Houghton, Mifflin.
Lantzeff, George. 1973. Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier to 1750. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Laufer, Berthold. 1902. The Decorative Art of the Amur Tribes. New York: The Knickerbocker Press.
Lee, Robert. 1970. The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lensen, George. 1964. Russia’s Eastward Expansion. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
———. 1967. The Russo-Chinese War. Tallahassee, Fla.: Diplomatic Press.
Lincoln, W. Bruce. 1994. The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.
Makine, . 1998. Once upon the River of Love. New York: Arcade.
Man, John. 2005. Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.
Mancall, Mark. 1971. Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Matthiessen, Peter. 2002. The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. London: Harvill Press.
Nyíri, Pál. 2002. Globalizing Chinese Migration: Trends in Europe and Asia. Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate.
Okladnikov, Aleksei Pavlovich. 1981. Ancient Art of the Amur Region: Rock Drawings, Sculpture, Pottery. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers.
Okladnikov, Aleksei Pavlovich, and Arctic Institute of North America. 1965. The Soviet Far East in Antiquity: An Archeological and Historical Study of the Maritime Region of the U.S.S.R. Toronto: Published for the Arctic Institute of North America by University of Toronto Press.
Perdue, Peter C. 2005. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Peterson, Willard. 2002. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Quested, R. K. I. 1968. The Expansion of Russia in East Asia, 1857–1860. University of Malaya Press [sole distributors: Oxford University Press, London, New York].
Raeff, Marc. 1966. The Decembrist Movement. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Rasputin, Valentin. 1989. Siberia on Fire: Stories and Essays. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
———. 1997. Siberia, Siberia. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Ravenstein, Ernst. 1861. The Russians on the Amur: Its Discovery, Conquest, and Colonization, with a Description of the Country, Its Inhabitants, Productions, and Commercial Capabilities . . . London: Trübner & Co.
Reid, Anna. 2002. The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. New York: Walker & Company.
Remezov, Semen. 1958. The Atlas of Siberia. The Hague: Mouton & Co.
Semyonov, Yuri. 1963. Siberia: Its Conquest and Development. London: Hollis & Carter.
Shternberg, Lev. 1999. The Social Organization of the Gilyak. New York; Seattle: American Museum of Natural History; distributed by the University of Washington Press.
Simonov, Eugene. 2008. Amur-Heilong River Basin Reader. Hong Kong: Ecosystems.
Stephan, John. 1994. The Russian Far East: A History. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Sutherland, Christine. 2001. The Princess of Siberia: The Story of Maria Volkonsky and the Decembrist Exiles. London: Quartet Books.
Thubron, Colin. 1999. In Siberia. New York: HarperCollins.
Twain, Mark. 1917. Life on the Mississippi. New York; London: Harper & Brothers.
Twitchett, Denis. 2008a. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2008b. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2008c. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Vakhtin, Nikolai. 1992. Native Peoples of the Russian Far North. London: Minority Rights Group.
Weinberg, Robert. 1998. Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928–1996. Vol. 52. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wenyon, Charles. 1903. Across Siberia on the Great Post-Road. London: Charles H. Kelly.
Wood, Alan. 2004. The Origins of the Russian Revolution, 1861–1917. New York: Routledge.
GLOSSARY
Amur
The English name (pronounced AH-mur) derives from the Russian name for the river, Amure. The Russians, in turn, are thought to have appropriated what the Daurians called the river—though since they then exterminated the Daurians, there is no way of knowing for sure. The Manchus call it the Sahaliyan Ula, or Black River. For the Chinese it is the or Heilongjiang (HEY-LONG-GEE-ANG)—Black Dragon’s River—after which China’s northeasternmost province is named. In French: L’Amour.
Datsan
The Buryats’ word for a Buddhist temple of the Gelugpa, or Yellow Hat, sect. A Tibetan derivation.
Del
Typical Mongolian tunic, worn by both men and women.<
br />
Ger
A circular felt tent, supported by an easily dismantled frame. The Mongolians’ equivalent of a yurt, ger simply means “home.”
Izba
A Russian log cabin.
Katorga
The Russian term for penal exile and hard labor. The word derives from the Greek for a galley, rowed by slaves.
Khadag
Mongolian for a Tibetan Buddhist ceremonial scarf, symbolizing purity and compassion.
Oprichnik (pl. Oprichniki)
An enforcer of Czar Ivan the Terrible’s repression against perceived internal enemies in the period of his rule, from 1565 to 1572, known as the Oprichnina. Some detect a line from the oprichniki through to the KGB and even to the Russian state apparatus under Vladimir Putin.
Promyshlennik (pl. Promyshlenniki)
A free man (or escaped serf from European Russia) who made his living in Siberia as a fur hunter or collector of yasak, fur tribute, from Siberia’s indigenous people. The equivalent of North America’s coureurs de bois. The promyshlenniki were instrumental in opening up Siberia for Russia.
Ssylka
A Russian term for banishment to Siberia. Less severe than katorga.
Ushanka
A Russian fur cap of the sort with ear flaps.
Voevoda
A governor, the principal local representative of state authority in Siberia, though more often concerned with his own interests than the czar’s.
Yasak
An annual fur tribute enforced by Russians on able-bodied natives. The word comes from the Tungusic group of languages: the Russians did not invent the practice.
INDEX
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