Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires
Written by Dominic Ziegler
Narrated by Steve West
4/5
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About this audiobook
Black Dragon River is a personal journey down one of Asia’s great rivers that reveals the region’s essential history and culture. The world’s ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with east Asia. He follows a journey from the river's top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past—and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today.
One of Asia’s mightiest rivers, the Amur is also the most elusive. The terrain it crosses is legendarily difficult to traverse. Near the river’s source, Ziegler travels on horseback from the Mongolian steppe into the taiga, and later he is forced by the river’s impassability to take the Trans-Siberian Railway through the four-hundred-mile valley of water meadows inland. As he voyages deeper into the Amur wilderness, Ziegler also journeys into the history of the peoples and cultures the river’s path has transformed.
The known history of the river begins with Genghis Khan and the rise of the Mongolian empire a millennium ago, and the story of the region has been one of aggression and conquest ever since. The modern history of the river is the story of Russia's push across the Eurasian landmass to China. For China, the Amur is a symbol of national humiliation and Western imperial land seizure; to Russia it is a symbol of national regeneration, its New World dreams and eastern prospects. The quest to take the Amur was to be Russia’s route to greatness, replacing an oppressive European identity with a vibrant one that faced the Pacific. Russia launched a grab in 1854 and took from China a chunk of territory equal in size nearly to France and Germany combined. Later, the region was the site for atrocities meted out on the Russian far east in the twentieth century during the Russian civil war and under Stalin.
The long shared history on the Amur has conditioned the way China and Russia behave toward each other—and toward the outside world. To understand Putin’s imperial dreams, we must comprehend Russia’s relationship to its far east and how it still shapes the Russian mind. Not only is the Amur a key to Putinism, its history is also embedded in an ongoing clash of empires with the West.
Dominic Ziegler
Dominic Ziegler is the Economist’s Asia editor. He was the founding author of Banyan, the Economist’s weekly column on Asian affairs. He has previously served as the magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief and as its China correspondent.
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Reviews for Black Dragon River
25 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Well written contemporary travelogue with glimpses of the recent past and a few hundred years ago. Like his format due each chapter. A region so lacking a popular history narrative.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A little unnecessarily in depth at times but the narration and historical account was engaging.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Black Dragon River has a long history, reaching as far back as Genghis Khan and the Mongolian empire around 1000 years ago. This was the beginning of its tumultuous history of conflict and war that has lasted pretty much until the present day. Also called the Amur, it is a river that I had never heard of until I picked this book up. Turns out it is the world’s ninth longest and forms part of the border between Russia and China and has been a focal point for each country’s expansion plans over the years. It has seen more than it fair share of death and destruction from both sides
Ziegler begins his journey along the river as Khan would have done, on a horse, from the Mongolian steppe into the taiga to what is thought to be the source of the river. His journey along the river is not always easy so he is forced to take the Trans-Siberian Railway through a valley of water meadows. He does return to the river and the people and places along it, but it almost seems to be a aside. I was hoping this was going to be a fascinating travel book about a relatively unknown part of the world, but sadly there was much more history than travel, and this is a place that has had a lot of brutal events happen. Not bad, but not great. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5By the time that the narrative of this travelogue comes into focus it turned out not to be the book I was expecting. From the way it starts I was expecting more of a natural history study. What you really wind up with is a meditation on the rise and fall of Russian dreams of empire in the Far East, with the question being whether the shabby present is just a portal to a new age of Chinese expansion. Though the author actually doubts that the winds of Chinese revanchism are going to blow west; the Sino-Russian relationship is just different from Beijing's adversarial history with the Pacific powers.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dominic Ziegler is a writer for the Economist who traveled 4000km from the source of the Amur River to the Pacific ocean (mostly by train), describing the present and the past of the region. I found it somewhat hard going because about 80% of the book is regional history regurgitated somewhat randomly about a place I knew very little about. Ziegler has done his history homework, the cast of characters is vast, and at times there are interesting stories. It just lacked something to hold it together. Part of the problem is Ziegler writes little about himself. Travel narratives are about discovery - not only of place and history but self. In the end it felt like an assignment completed, most of it cribbed from the archives to fill out a travel book lacking in incident. Which is too bad as the incidents he does write about are good.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A fascinating account of travel along the river Amus, so called by the Siberians and Black Dragon River by the Chinese.
This river flows between the two powerful countries and the book is about the author's very eventful journey along the nearly 5,000 miles of water, meeting various chracters along the way.
I was given a digital copy by the publisher via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.