Intrepid Asian travel writer Colin Thubron returns to Asia to travel the Amur river which roughly separates the frontiers of Russia and China. Thubron may be my favorite living travel writer one paragraph from him is a rare combination of poetry and history. In his hands he is able to perceive history through landscape and people. This particular territory is fraught with centuries of conflict between Russian Chinese and various tribes who are caught up in the tension. It was not unusual to hear about entire towns being wiped out either by the Mongols or an avenging Russian or Chinese Army. The best in armchurch travel as I will not likely have a chance to visit myself. Highly recommend. ( )

In the summers of 2018 and 2019, heading towards his eightieth birthday, Thubron followed the Amur from its source in Mongolia (where it's called the Onon) all the way to Nikolaevsk where it enters the Sea of Okhotsk. When Chekhov travelled to the Russian Far East in 1890, the passage down the Amur in a steamship was the only relaxed and comfortable part of his journey, and he gets positively lyrical in his descriptions of the scenery. Thubron's experience is rather different: the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway killed the river traffic on the lower Amur (Vladivostok is a much more sensible place for a port than Nikolaevsk), and border tensions between the USSR and China have also kept its upper reaches off-limits for much of the 20th century.

Thubron starts off on horseback in the hills of Mongolia, in a protected region thought to contain the secret burial site of Genghis Khan, and we're only a couple of pages in when he has his second fall, injuring himself and obviously starting to wonder whether he really needs this kind of adventure at his age. But he sticks to it, and finds the source, which like most sources of great rivers is not exactly spectacular.

From there he goes on, cadging lifts with Buddhist monks, hiring taxis or taking local buses or ferries, into Siberia and then over the river to the Chinese side for a while downstream from Heihe, then back to the Russian side at Khabarovsk. As usual, his main interest is in talking to people along the way and finding out how they relate to the place they are living in and its history, and that's something he's very good at: he clearly manages to have interesting conversations even with people most of us would steer well clear of, like the ex-mercenary sturgeon poachers who guide him on the lower river, and gives us what seems to be a fair representation of their point of view.

Great travel writing, and a very interesting look at a part of the world I didn't know much about. ( )

Thubron achieves a good balance between scenery, culture and history, and individuals, with little solipsistic angst.

> Between 1237 and 1239 the north-west Mongol power, the Golden Horde, overswept this vulnerable region, crushing Kiev, the most powerful and refined of its states, and settled to impose fearsome levies on the surviving Slavic peoples. For over two centuries Russia’s subjugation under the Mongols drastically realigned it, impairing its future convergence with western Europe. The so-called ‘Tartar yoke’, some historians suggest, gave birth to Russia’s stoic fatalism, freezing it in serfdom and autocracy. Thus, by an outrageous sleight of mind, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin and Putin become the offspring of Genghis Khan

> The Tibetan Buddhism that spread through the country in the seventeenth century did its own share of persecuting. Sometimes it took over shamanic rites and spirits under other names, even the worship of Genghis Khan, and lamas officiated with local chiefs in grand ovoo ceremonies; at other times the shamans were arraigned and executed. By 1920, on the brink of disaster, the hegemony of the Buddhist church enveloped the whole land in a suffocating shroud. One third of the populace were monks or monastic dependants, and travellers wrote with repugnance of their indolence and debauchery. It took the Soviet-backed republic almost twenty years to undo this becalmed theocracy, levelling most of its three thousand monasteries and temples, and secularizing or slaughtering their monks.

> ‘There’s no hope for us here in the Far East. No future! Even the Chinese who invested over here are starting to regret it.’ I say: ‘They seem to be resented too.’ ‘Yes, they are. The Asia Hotel – it’s the grandest in Blagoveshchensk – is owned by a Chinese man who drives a Bentley, and a Chinese businesswoman bought up our factory for brewing kvass. But things have got worse for them now.’ He emits a glint of schadenfreude. ‘Where is there any future? In western Russia, perhaps? In Moscow?’ His fingers grind on the steering wheel. ‘I don’t think so. I’m a good Russian, but I don’t want to live here. I don’t want my children to live here. We live in a prison.’ ( )