Black Dragon River Read online

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  Copyright © 2015 by Dominic Ziegler

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  ISBN 978-0-698-41016-9

  Version_1

  For Ru, with love

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Onon CHAPTER 1: 48°12.3' N 108°29.0' E

  CHAPTER 2: 48°45.0' N 108°54.5' E

  CHAPTER 3: 48°59.8' N 109°7.8' E

  CHAPTER 4: 48°12.3' N 108°29.0' E

  PART TWO: Irkutsk CHAPTER 5: 52°18.0' N 104°17.7' E

  PART THREE: Chita CHAPTER 6: 51°02.7' N 115°37.7' E

  CHAPTER 7: 52°01.5' N 113°30.3' E

  PART FOUR: Nerchinsk CHAPTER 8: 51°58.7' N 116°35.1' E

  CHAPTER 9: 52°21.7' N 127°31.0' E

  PART FIVE: Albazino CHAPTER 10: 53°21.2' N 124°05.3' E

  CHAPTER 11: 53°59.3' N 123°56.2' E

  CHAPTER 12: 53°22.8' N 124°04.9' E

  CHAPTER 13: 52°15.3' N 117°42.7' E

  PART SIX: Blagoveshchensk CHAPTER 14: 50°16.8' N 127°24.7' E

  PART SEVEN: Khabarovsk CHAPTER 15: 48°28.3' N 135°03.0' E

  CHAPTER 16: 48°19.2' N 134°49.8' E

  PART EIGHT: Nikolaevsk CHAPTER 17: 53°02.5' N 141°15.3' E

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  GLOSSARY

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  Throw yourself with confidence upon this flowing tide, for upon this generous river shall float navies, richer and more powerful than those of Tarshish . . . and at its mouth . . . shall congregate the merchant princes of the earth.

  PERRY MCDONOUGH COLLINS, A Voyage Down the Amoor, 1860

  The Amur, no commonplace river, is well worth following. It is the only major river in Siberia that runs not north into the Arctic Sea but east into the Pacific Ocean. If you measure the river from the most distant of its sources, it is the world’s ninth-longest: at 2,826 miles, it is longer than the Congo or the Mekong, and it drains a basin bigger than the Yangzi’s. People rarely do measure from the source, for no very sound reason, preferring to start halfway down where the Shilka and the Argun tributaries, both respectable waters in their own right, join to form the Amur proper. Even from this point the Amur is impressive, with 1,755 miles still to run till the sea. To the north of the river is the great Russian empire, to the south the Chinese one.

  As the long reel of the river’s story turns, many peoples flicker in and out of view as they move along the Amur’s banks or float upon its waters: Mongols, Evenki, Nivkh, Manchus, Daurians, Nanai, Solons, and Ulchi, to name a few; and then there were the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans. In many ways the Amur is the meeting ground for Asia’s great empires and peoples.

  For much of my life the Amur was the longest river I had never heard of. The Amur approached me slantwise. When I was a foreign correspondent living in Beijing, I made a trip to what used to be called Manchuria and is now China’s northeast. I flew to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province. It was February, and minus 24 degrees. On the main square men with chain saws and ice picks were turning blocks of ice into artistic forms: swans, missile launchers, Chairman Mao, Father Christmas. The ice came from the Songhua River, chief tributary of the Heilongjiang itself—the Black Dragon River, which is what the Chinese call the Amur, and they gave the name to the province. The main stream was still some way to the north, marking not just the province’s northern border, but the country’s. On the other side of the Amur, Russia began. But in Harbin you could still feel—only just, because the city was undergoing an orgy of redevelopment—that this had once been a chiefly Russian place.

  It had indeed been the largest city of European residents outside Europe, a Russian railway town at the turn of the last century that later, during the Russian civil war, was refuge to fifty thousand White Russians. Redbrick Russian buildings still lined the main street. Some city officials, spurning overcoats to go out into the punchy cold, took me to sing karaoke as the sun set. We sang “Edelweiss” (in Chinese) and a Mao Zedong verse about the Long March. But they all spoke Russian, and we also sang the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” in as doleful a bass as the vodka enabled.

  The officials then took me to a surviving Russian restaurant. No Russians, it is true, were serving there, only Chinese. But the food came as a shock after China’s usual fabulous fare. I was served a bowl in which a gray piece of Amur salmon swam in a greasy slop. This was ukha, I was told (there was no choice), Russia’s traditional fish soup. Later in the Russian Far East I discovered that there, too, this wonderful reviving soup could on occasion be prepared by unloving hands. The Chinese-made ukha in front of me looked inedible. But my waitress would not set it on the table until I had paid up front for it. That also happened to me in Russia, later. But only in Harbin did it ever happen to me in China.

  On that visit, the Amur was just a presence, felt but not seen. A few years later, on a winter flight from London to Tokyo, where by now I was living, I pulled up the blind after a fitful night, a couple of hours before we were to land. The sun was low, and the clouds had cleared. Below, all was a wilderness picked out by brilliant shafts of light. The taiga was cut through by a broad white ribbon that snaked north and then, on the far fringe of the curving earth, turned purposefully east before debouching, stillborn, into a frozen sea. Along the length of this forceful river I struggled to find human signs. I was smitten.

  I resolved to find out more about the Amur. I learned that the modern history of the river is the story of Russia’s push across the Eurasian landmass, and the story of its unanticipated meeting with China. It was in the Amur watershed that China signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia in 1689, its first treaty with a European power and one that regulated the two countries’ relations for nearly two centuries. To this day China views Russia differently from other Europeans. At Nerchinsk, the terms very much suited China, for they held Russians at bay. Nerchinsk was a treaty negotiated on the basis of strict equality. Later, in the nineteenth century, a stricken China was forced into a series of “unequal” treaties with Western powers. Today the Chinese state nourishes its schoolchildren on a diet of victimhood at the hands of Western imperialists. Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was every bit the imperialist, joining Britain, France, Germany, the United States and—later—militarist Japan, in carving China up. But today Russia’s part has been forgiven or forgotten, or considered somehow different.

  This has very little to do with a shared history of Communism in the twentieth century. Indeed, Sino-Soviet fraternity crumbled following the death of Stalin in 1953, not long after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong ensured that antagonisms grew, and in 1969 a skirmish broke out on the ice of the Amur River that threatened to spark a more general conflagration along the whole 2,700-mile frontier.
But in China, all that goes largely unmentioned.

  Above all, apparently forgiven and forgotten (for now) in a country that cherishes its humiliations is a garguantan Russian grab of territory from China the scale of which dwarfs all the better remembered Western depredations in the Victorian period—Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the other Treaty Ports. This imperialist grab was very different from the others, driven as they were by hardheaded and well-informed calculations of power and profit. Rather, for a couple of decades around the middle of the nineteenth century, the Amur River was at the heart of an extravagant delusion that gripped the people of a stagnant autocratic Russia under Czar Nicholas I who were all too ready to share in an episode of mad escapism. Russians rediscovered a river that for centuries had hung forgotten on the eastern edge of their realm, flowing through empty Chinese lands. They knew almost nothing of this river and its watershed—neither its physical aspects nor, really, who dwelled there. All the better: onto this river they first projected dreams of mineral and agricultural wealth, and then dreams of national renewal. This river-road was to be Russians’ route to greatness. Above all, it seemed to offer a golden chance for Russia to replace an oppressive European identity with a vibrant one facing the Pacific. Thanks to the Amur, Russia—ground down by czarist absolutism, its peasantry enserfed, and even its aristocrats admitting the country to be at a dead end—could contemplate a hopeful future.

  Today it is clear that this delusion was fed far more by awareness of the unrolling of the American frontier than by any knowledge Russians had about their own Far East. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russians consumed the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, chronicler of the American frontier. The newspapers were full of tales of the California gold rush that was then under way. When seizing upon the Amur River as a wellspring of national renewal, Russians were fed by New World dreams. The river would be Russia’s Mississippi. The supposedly lush region the Amur River drained was to be a new America. The natives there were crying out for Russia’s civilizing hand. Russians just had to have the Amur. Led by Eastern Siberia’s governor-general, Nikolay Muraviev, they launched a grab in 1854 and took from China a chunk of territory equal nearly to France and Germany combined. They took it without firing a shot. Then, almost instantly, they regretted their folly.

  • • •

  The Amur is one Asia’s mightiest rivers but I was soon to learn that it is also the most elusive. Over the centuries, the names for it have shifted like the sands at its mysterious mouth. The Manchus once had dominion. They revered the river as the Sahaliyan Ula, or the Black River. They were in awe of its magic powers, but the Manchus are now gone. Among the Russians who now live along what they call the Amure, few recall that they took the name—Amur, or “good peace”—from the greeting extended by local Daurians, most of whom the early Russian incomers then exterminated.

  Scarcely the least of the altercations between Russia and China over the great stream that runs between them is quite where the headwaters of the Amur River may be said to lie. The matter has been laid to rest only recently—and perhaps only for now.

  Russia long ago took to insisting that the source was the Ingoda River, just east of Lake Baikal, Earth’s biggest lake, with a fifth of all the world’s fresh water. Russians have long been intimate with this particular river, though at more than four hundred miles long and never deep, by Siberian standards it is a rivulet. When setting out from Irkutsk or the southern end of Lake Baikal, the Ingoda formed the natural route to the silver mines of Nerchinsk, first exploited by Greek mining experts whom Czar Peter the Great brought to Siberia in the late 1600s. Then, very soon after, the mines were dug by the first of many, many men from European Russia who were banished to Siberia under a sentence of katorga, that is, exile and hard labor.

  On the Ingoda is Chita, the settlement Czar Nicholas I approved as the place of exile for a very particular group of men condemned to katorga, the Decembrists, so named after the month in which they made their futile gesture. These young, hopelessly romantic noblemen had returned from the wars against Napoleon and were infected with a European passion for liberalism and constitutional government. They had changed, in other words, while autocratic Russia had not. Their aspirations were quite out of keeping with the absolutism of the czars. In St. Petersburg’s Senate Square on December 14, 1825, a day when his troops were to swear loyalty to the new czar, the noblemen launched a coup of stunning ineptitude as they mislaid their revolutionary ardor. One strode purposefully onto the square only to complain of a headache. The man chosen as the coup leader, Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, failed to show up; instead, his face muffled, he wandered despondently about the city. Now that they were leaderless, the rebel troops lined up against Czar Nicholas’s ranks in Senate Square were defenseless, and hundreds were mowed down.

  Till the end of his life Nicholas was obsessed with that day in the square. His response to it set the tone for three decades of rule during which ideas and imagination were given no truck. The proto-revolutionaries became Russia’s first prisoners of conscience. The scale of their bungling in St. Petersburg was notable. But in the popular mind it came to be outweighed by the purity of their ideals. Above all, the Decembrists wanted an end to the serfdom that oppressed the Russian state nearly as much as it did the millions of peasants who lived and died as slaves. In Chita the old log Church of Archangel Michael with its Decembrist memorabilia remains a shrine to these men and their remarkable wives. Their example serves as a reminder and at times an inspiration, even today, of other possibilities for Russia than an autocratic state.

  Later, when the Amur seemed to open up new eastern vistas, the Ingoda became the natural route to them. First adventurers, then soldiers, governors, natural philosophers, tradesmen, runaway serfs, projectors, dreamers, vagabonds, hard men, revolutionaries, and eventually, by the late nineteenth century, whole peasant villages from European Russia all traveled down the Ingoda in the search for a different future. Sometimes much farther: one June day in 1861 the irrepressible bulk of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin escaped down the Amur and traveled eastward three-quarters of the way around the world until, four months later, he stood with beard, huge smile, and rotting teeth on the London doorstep of his exiled friend and fellow radical Alexander Herzen.

  The Great Siberian Railroad, now known as the Trans-Siberian Railway, put this flow of people, cargo, and war matériel on a sounder footing. Completed in 1905, in haste because war had broken out with Japan, the railroad runs through the Ingoda’s water meadows for much of the long valley, the view from the dining car little changed. The Ingoda, then, became Russia’s route to the ocean and window, it seemed only a century ago, to a grander Pacific destiny, one that seemed to promise all too briefly the rebirth of Russia herself.

  As for the Chinese, they championed their Songhua River as the Amur’s pure original source. Westerners know the river as the Sungari, from the old Manchu name meaning White River (perhaps on account of its limpid water). The Sungari is the Amur’s longest and most powerful tributary, 650,000 gallons sluicing every second into the main Amur stream at a point far downriver from the Ingoda. The Sungari’s source lies high up in the Changbai range in China’s northeast, on the border today with North Korea. These are potent mountains. They are the mythical birthplace of the ancestors of the tribesmen who founded the Manchu state and then conquered China, ruling until a century ago as the Qing dynasty, China’s last, if you do not count the Communists.

  Meanwhile another country also piggybacks off the magic mountains’ power. North Korea is the world’s last totalitarian state. State mythology claims that in 1942 Kim Jong Il, North Koreans’ late Dear Leader, was born on the slopes of Mount Changbai (“Eternally White,” Mount Baektu to Koreans), at a time when his father was leading Korean freedom fighters against the aggression of imperial Japan. It also claims that a swallow foretold the birth, and a double rainbow attended it. In truth, though you would go to the gulag for saying it, Kim was born
on the grimy outskirts of Khabarovsk, Russia’s chief city on the Amur, where his father commanded a Soviet battalion of Korean and Chinese guerrillas. It is one of those strange things that also in a compound in Khabarovsk, in 1945, was the Last Manchu, Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty. He spent five years in Soviet captivity after his Japanese-backed pocket empire of Manchukuo collapsed with Japan’s surrender. The fallen emperor whiled away the days reading the Diamond Sutra and raising green peppers and tomatoes in the yard, while others among his shrunken entourage held séances in the bedrooms.

  Mao Zedong and his Communist followers used to claim they were driving everything foreign out of China, starting with the Manchu legacy. Yet in territorial matters, never was the Chinese empire larger and more secure than in the heyday of the Qing dynasty. As a sense only grows, along with economic clout, of a return to historical greatness, Beijing’s rulers today cling ever more fervently to the Qing’s maximalist definition of China’s empire. Yet inside the current borders, some ethnic groups chafe at repression by the Han Chinese rulers: Tibetans on the roof of the world, Uighurs in Xinjiang in the far west of China, and ethnic Mongols in Inner Mongolia; periodically unhappiness spills over into violence, always met by the authorities with a mailed fist. All the while, Taiwan, first conquered by the Qing dynasty’s Kangxi emperor in the late 1600s, has slipped from the Communists’ grasp—a renegade province, they say. They vow to win Taiwan back, by force if necessary, even with nuclear weapons.

  In this context the vast lands north of the Amur River and east of its great tributary, the Ussuri, come into focus, lands once known as “Outer Manchuria” or “Outer Tartary.” What will become of them? Russia seized these lands at a time when Western imperial powers were carving up a stricken China among themselves—“like a melon,” as Chinese pointed out at the time. Russians have since had a century and a half to convince themselves that the lands were always rightfully theirs. Yet in the meantime China’s Communists have spun a narrative of national humiliation around the carve-up, and now destiny seems to be on their side: Hong Kong, ruled by the British, returned to the motherland in 1997, the Portuguese enclave of Macau two years later. Taiwan, Beijing says, is just a matter of time. So where does that leave Outer Tartary and the Russians living there? China has revived no claim since Mao Zedong’s time. But Russians in the Far East know their numbers are dwindling. Han Chinese, Russians say, are filtering silently through the forests of the Russian East and settling in the decaying towns. It is only a matter of time, Russians say, before China stakes its claim. Hence it matters where the Amur’s source lies. It is why it disturbs Russians when the Chinese say that the Songhua, rising in the Changbai mountains, is the Amur’s proper source—that the Songhua, indeed, is the great and essential stream, and that the Amur is its mere tributary.