The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds
A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road, and the Rise of Modern China
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Czar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty's sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last czarist agent in the so–called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China's modernization, from education reform and foreign investment to Tibet's struggle for independence.
On July 6, 2006, writer Eric Enno Tamm boards that same train, intent on following in Mannerheim's footsteps. Initially banned from China, Tamm devises a cover and retraces Mannerheim's route across the Silk Road, discovering both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago.
Along the way, Tamm offers piercing insights into China's past that raise troubling questions about its future. Can the Communist Party truly open China to the outside world yet keep Western ideas such as democracy and freedom at bay, just as Qing officials mistakenly believed? What can reform during the late Qing Dynasty teach us about the spectacular transformation of China today? As Confucius once wrote, "Study the past if you would divine the future," and that is just what Tamm does in The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lengthy volume, Canadian journalist Tamm (Beyond the Outer Shores) chronicles the journey Baron Gustaf Mannerheim took in 1906 from St. Petersburg to Beijing by retracing his steps 100 years to the day later. Asked by Czar Nicholas II to collect secret intelligence on the Qing Dynasty's sweeping reforms, Mannerheim sketched Chinese garrison towns, took over a thousand photographs, and mapped three thousand kilometers of his route, in turn precisely documenting China's modernization. Tamm utilizes Mannerheim's extensive journals to effectively recreate sights and sounds across a vast landscape in an effort to better understand China's future by examining its past. The more gripping sections, however, are those in which Tamm details his own more recent trek through "a gauntlet of political and geographic extremes, including some of the world's hottest deserts, highest mountain ranges and cruelest dictatorships." Tamm writes of poverty in China, ethnic factions, pollution, communism, and occasional crass consumerism within his travelogue. In doing so, he provides substantial insight on the contradictions and concerns that define much of the country today.
