Black Dragon River Read online

  Not long ago, Chinese and Russian geographers decided the matter of the Amur simply had to be resolved. Not just truth was at stake, but dignity and perhaps even national destiny. Satellite maps were printed, to expansive scales. Compasses and dividers were applied to them. For days, geographers from the two countries took the measure of every tributary that coursed in animated squiggles or glided away in oxbow meanders on its way to meeting the main stream. In the end the conclusion was unexpected, even shocking. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could deny it, and in that Beijing room it would be nice to think that someone even laughed. For the Amur’s source, that is, the one most distant from the river’s mouth and the ocean beyond it, lay in neither one country nor the other. The Amur tributary farthest from the sea was the Onon River. And for that half of the year in which all the streams of Siberia are not hard-frozen, the Onon’s headwaters bubble from the side of a mountain not in China or in Russia, but in a wild part of northern Mongolia. I resolved to see the Onon’s source, source of the Amur, the Amoor, the Black Dragon River, L’Amour, one the world’s great rivers, siren stream to dreamers.

  I resolved not just to find the source but to follow the whole watercourse of the Amur River. The challenges, it quickly became apparent, would be formidable. At home, my collection of aeronautical charts from the United States Defense Mapping Agency that covered the Amur basin piled ever higher. The river is longer than North America is broad, and the terrain diverse. To reach the Onon headwaters would mean traveling by horse; at the other end of the river, the final run would have to be done by the ancient Soviet hydrofoil that tied the town at the Amur’s mouth to the rest of the world, and then only during the summer months, before the river froze.

  Yet the political challenges appeared to be as daunting as the physical distances. For all the exclamations of brotherly relations between Russia and China, they keep their guard up—Russia especially—along their border. This is a problem for a riverine explorer, since for nearly two thousand miles the Amur marks that border and is, in effect, out of bounds, the banks marked out by trip wires and watchtowers. Talk of even a bridge across the river tying the two countries together has come to nothing (something which, along with the wild Amur’s complete absence of dams, fills me with secret pleasure). Fewer than half a dozen border crossings operate along the river, ferries shunting passengers back and forth for the short ride between the two countries. For a Briton—and a suspect journalist to boot—securing visas in these parts is like hunting for hen’s teeth. It would mean that for great chunks of my journey I would have to abandon hopes of waterborne travel and take to the Trans-Siberian Railway as it shadows the course of the Amur on the Russian side.

  No matter how I traveled, I hoped for much. I hoped that the Amur would serve as a lens—clear on some occasions, necessarily opaque on others—to understand how it has shaped the empires that have come into contact with it, past and present. Looking back, I do not think I imagined to find in such empty country the degrees of violence and cruelty I encountered in the history of the early Russians moving east. I wondered whether this original sin set the tone for the better known atrocities meted out on the Russian Far East in the twentieth century, notably during the Russian civil war and under Stalin.

  But I also hoped to find wilderness—wild redemptive places that the Amur basin promised thanks both to its scale and to its biological diversity, which is extraordinary. The basin encompasses an amazing range of ecoregions, from tundra to boreal taiga forests, to steppe grasslands, deciduous temperate forests, and wetlands. In some mountains, you will find the ibex; in the broadleaf forests, the Amur leopard (still hanging on) and butterflies the size of handkerchiefs; in the Amur itself, the giant sturgeon; and along the river’s banks, the wild lotus. It is not just that wild places stir me deeply—reason enough to want to make this journey. I was also curious to learn how the scale of the Amur wilderness had shaped and modulated the empires and peoples that stood before it. And to weigh against an inevitable litany today of environmental degradation and destruction (a logging and mining boom is taking place in Russia, while in just three decades the population in the Chinese part of the basin has doubled), I rather hoped to find some good news. In particular, I had heard that a common desire to protect a magnificent family of birds, the cranes, six of whose species breed in the Amur basin, had served to break down political antagonisms across prickly borders.

  But now the seasons were moving on, with winter not far away. Though mine was a more humdrum journey, like the cranes I had to be off.

  PART ONE

  Onon

  CHAPTER 1

  48°12.3' N 108°29.0' E

  The phoenix of prosperity wishes to make the roof of one man its abode, while the owl of misfortune wishes to haunt the threshold of another.

  JUVAINI, The History of the World Conqueror

  The way to the Onon headwaters is north, via Mongonmorit. The settlement is a county center: Silver Horse, it means. Mongonmorit crawls up one side of the wide valley of the south-flowing Kherlen River, a scattering of log cabins sheltering behind stockades that splay at drunken angles. Jeep tracks count for streets. Stray cows keep down hints of municipal grass, and goats recycle the trash. I had been here once before, in midwinter, during Tsagaan Tsar, the festival of the white moon—the Mongolian New Year. Then, tables strained under mounds of food: curds and sweets and sides of butchered mutton and always the Mongolian sheep’s fat and prized tail. A pyramid of cookies stood in for the mountains of Shambhala, that pure, visionary land.

  The days were spent first greeting elders and then everybody else. Within gentle handclasps, snuff bottles passed from one man to the next were admired and then returned. A monk hung khadag, Buddhist scarves of blue silk, around our necks. Neither the steamed mutton dumplings nor the vodka nor the singing of slow, formal airs stopped flowing. Outside, the weaker animals succumbed to the rapier cold, calves deep-frozen where they fell. On the third day, or perhaps it was the fourth, or fifth, the town emerged as one into the crystal air. A motorcycle, spanking new from a China factory, gleamed in the middle of the steppe, first prize for a horse race to mark the new year. Boy and girl jockeys climbed into saddles in felt boots and thick, embroidered jackets. The children sang to their horses, reminding them of their valor. And then they rode out together, one thick press, out of town and over the ridges to the start some two hours’ ride away. When they returned, this time strung out in a long, irregular, staggering line, fifty mounts with ice-foamed flanks were urged back into town. By the end, the jockeys were beyond exhaustion, like their horses. They fell out of their saddles and stumbled toward their families, burying frozen tears in mothers’ coats.

  In winter, we had come by jeep up the Kherlen River, a slick, white, empty highway. But now, when I return, it is the close of a glorious summer. Mongonmorit is empty, because herders have driven their animals to fatten on far pastures, where the men and women also take hay before winter. The curling ribbon of the Kherlen has taken on the hue of the khadag sky. Though scarcely out of the tumbling mountains, the river flows with the strong, smooth gait that will carry it for another six hundred miles over into northeastern China.

  On the steppe, the brief riot of summer is very nearly over: the grasshoppers and crickets fizz just as they did in high summer, but the khaki grasses rustle underfoot like old parchment. Marsh birds are on the move, greenshank and snipe starting up with a cry. Wildfowl barrel toward the southwest in urgent knots and, high up, a flapping ball of lapwings is harried by a hawk. Above all, the flies are gone. The bloodsucking torment of the gadflies and mosquitoes is over. Gone, too, are the chief of the tormentors, clouds of flesh-smothering blackflies that swarm in summer like smoke from a prairie fire. Horse weather, at last.

  Mongonmorit is the last human settlement. Looking upstream, hazy ridges converge, and the flat valley funnels to a vanishing point. Beyond that is nothing: no dwelling, not even a tent, for count
less miles—virgin forest until the Russian border, and probably well beyond it. It is as vast and true a wilderness as it is possible to imagine, and the Onon headwaters promise to lie at the heart of it. The seduction of it sharpens the pleasures: of appetite, naturally, and of the clean scent of autumn; but also of anticipation.

  Of course, notions of wilderness get rudely qualified in our anthropocene age. The impact of humans is evident in even the remotest parts of land or sea, if only you look for it. I looked hard, in dusty shelves, before coming here, and two things struck home about the wild places ahead of me. It was, first, a more peopled land in past centuries than now, especially in warmer periods: crisscrossed by hunters of game and gatherers of pine nuts and cloudberries; used by herders for summer grazing; borrowed as a refuge by people who, for one reason or another, were on the run; or simply a range to cross on the way back home. It was to some, perhaps many, a familiar region. Probably that is true of most of the places we value for being solitary and wild.

  Second, but more unusually, the human impact, the more emphatic human impact, came not from outside this remote region pressing in: climate change, airborne pollution, logging, hunting—the usual dismal litanies. Rather, the truly powerful impact came from one single human raised eight hundred years ago near the Onon headwaters. And his impact is not measured on the parochial scale of his home turf, these mountains ahead, but on a scale that encompassed continents. For the boy Temujin was raised in this wild place, and he later came to be Genghis Khan, the supreme khan, khan of “all the people living in felt tents.”

  Through a sense of a divine mandate, sheer will, military flair, and the exhibition of both extraordinary cruelty and, to some, extraordinary devotion, this ruler forged a people. And through a string of stunning conquests, Genghis Khan directed his armies to found a Mongol realm that stretched from China to the Euphrates, Korea to Eastern Europe, the Pacific to the Mediterranean: the biggest contiguous empire the world has known.

  I think no individual in the past millennium can have impacted the planet more than Genghis Khan, and only Jesus and Muhammad before him. If that seems fanciful, consider a study carried out by a group of geneticists a few years ago into Asian variations in the patterns of DNA. They sampled two thousand men from sixteen Asian population groups stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific. To the geneticists’ intense surprise, they discovered that 8 percent of the men shared a common lineage of Y chromosomes (possessed by men but not women). They had, in other words, stumbled upon a shared ancestor of these men, a single individual apparently living in Mongolia one thousand years ago, give or take. Such a rapid spread of genes cannot have happened by chance. It points, rather, to an extreme form of social selection. Only a certain kind of man can possibly have scattered his seed so abundantly, a conqueror who has the pick of the breeding-age women, one who slaughters enemy warriors on a vast scale and carries away their widows and daughters: Genghis Khan. Extrapolating from the sample, 8 percent of males in populations from Uzbekistan to northeast China, or the core area of the Mongol empire at the time of Genghis Khan’s death, share the common lineage. Sixteen million males, one in two hundred of the world’s men, have Genghis Khan in their blood.

  In other ways it is not fanciful to imagine that Genghis Khan reverberates in the lands through which he and his successor khans passed, and in ways that shape them today. In Mongolia, this is not hard to miss. For seven decades of the twentieth century the country was the second ever Communist state, a satellite of the Soviet Union (whose embrace it preferred over China’s). During that time, Mongolia’s Communist rulers suppressed all admiration for Genghis Khan, that feudal, imperialist bandit. They understood his potency. And, sure enough, since Communism fell in 1990 and Mongolia gained true independence, the young impoverished democracy has, with a vengeance, staked its claim to the great khan as the chief identifier for a land cut loose from the old certainties, squeezed between two giants, Russia and China, and now in thrall to a mining boom whose potential will either make a poor country extraordinarily prosperous, or tear it apart in an orgy of corruption and inequity.

  But the old reverberations, perhaps more dimly sensed, nevertheless seem to shape the impulses of another, still bigger country once under Mongol rule: Russia itself, with a very old Asian dimension. If the Mongols’ thirteenth-century destruction of European Russia had any lasting influence on the later Russian state, marking it out from the rest of Europe, it was perhaps one of two things. Either “Oriental despotism” had laid the foundations for czarist despotism, Soviet tyranny, and post-Soviet strongman rule—“scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar,” Napoleon was supposed to have said. Or, more creatively, Russians had learned from the Mongols the imperative of political unity in ruling an expanse of land that soon stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific—Russians, in other words, took up the Mongols’ task and completed it. Russians today dispute which view is the more correct, depending on outlook. Either way, I now wanted to explore how Russians had pushed so far east, thousands of miles from their European heartland.

  The impetus for my search came quite unexpectedly, during my winter under the white moon, on that first visit to Mongonmorit and its surroundings. With Gala, my friend, we called on the family of a herder, a pillar of the community on whose chest were pinned rows of Soviet-era medals. We exchanged snuff bottles and new-year greetings, and then we talked about mutual friends, and about the unusual cold that year, scything down the herds.

  After a while, the door of the ger, the felt tent, sprang open, and a young man in Mongolian dress and leather riding boots like the rest stepped in and sat on the iron bed opposite us—the family’s only bed—between the herder’s two grandsons. He put an arm around each of them, as if the third brother. But there was a difference. The young man was fair and blue-eyed: wild blue eyes and tousled hair.

  He looked at me with feigned lack of surprise, as all Mongolians do when foreigners enter the ger: in the countryside, hospitality is all, and interrogation an uncouth form of conversation. I could hardly blurt out the questions I wanted to ask of this young man, a country Mongolian in all his ways except his European face. A little later, he left as briskly as he had arrived, having uttered not a word, except in whispers to his brothers. The thump of hooves raced away soon after he had shut the door. Only later, sideways, did I ask about him, and then the old herder gave the details matter-of-factly: he was a Russian backwoodsman; he had appeared a few years before out of the forests to the north, gathering mushrooms and pine nuts; he had come to this family and he had never left; he herded with them in the summer, and gathered nuts in the winter; he was now a son, and nobody thought much of it.

  To me, that afternoon’s meeting seemed wildly implausible, challenging lazy assumptions about a clear line between West and East, Europeans and Asians, rich countries and poor. I wanted to understand better, and I knew then that I would see Mongonmorit again. It was the way to the Onon, which I felt held a clue to the earliest impulses that drew Russia eastward, taking a small nation out of its forest fastness far away in northwestern Europe until it grew, four hundred–odd years ago, into a continental power—one which, unexpectedly, came up against a more sophisticated, a more established, in every way a more puissant empire: China itself. That meeting took place along the Amur River, of which the Onon is the source. I had to start at the beginning.

  CHAPTER 2

  48°45.0' N 108°54.5' E

  I have come to Mongonmorit from Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital, with Gala and another friend, Morgan. We are traveling by jeep, a UAZ (pronounced waz, to rhyme with as), the Russian-made, workhorse of the steppe. Two in every three Mongolian men, blindfolded, can take apart a UAZ engine, and every settlement will have someone who can find or fabricate any part of a UAZ that might conceivably need replacing. In past years with Gala, usually in the same battered transport, I have bucked the length and breadth of Mongolia, hitching a lift with a man whose passion i
s the country’s steppelands. For Gala, a conservationist, fifteen or sixteen hours of bone-shaking ride a day is of no consequence so long as the destination is a wild expanse of grasslands in which to put up a tent. He will drive thirty miles out of town rather than stay in a hotel.

  One day he was camped high up in Mongolia’s Darhad Depression, a rift valley three hundred miles west of where we are now, when a striking young American wearing a del, the Mongolian coat, rode out of the mountains that for several months had been her home. Right out of college, Morgan had given up her charmed life in New England to help a remote group of pastoralists, nomad reindeer herders whose animals graze moss and lichen high up over the mountain passes.