The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
3,000 miles, two cracked ribs and one modern masterpiece
Colin Thubron chronicles a death-defying trip along the China-Russia border
In 1967, in the dog days before the outbreak of the Six Day War, a young English writer published a book, his first, about Damascus. The blackand-white author portrait showed a thin, shy public schoolboy with neatly brushed hair and a pair of bicycle clips. This week, the same author, now 82, has just published his 11th travel book. In the 54 years separating the two books, the world has changed beyond all recognition, and so has Colin Thubron. Today, since the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor, VS Naipaul and Jan Morris, he is rightly recognised as Britain’s greatest living travel writer. He is also looked upon as something of a national treasure, whose silver-fox good looks have made him the most admired literary pin-up since Samuel Beckett.
Thubron may now be an octogenarian, but his new book, The Amur River: Between Russia and China, shows him still at the peak of his powers. To write it, he flew first to Mongolia and travelled on horseback through some of the toughest swamplands in the world, looking for the source of the book’s eponymous river: “Sometimes this uncertain earth, mined with hidden quagmires, opened like a trapdoor under us,” he writes. “Suddenly the horses would be dropping to their withers and peat-laden water brimming over their backs. Then they began to struggle out, their eyeballs white and bulging, their forelegs scrambling for a hold, their hind legs kicking in panic.”
It was in one such moment that Thubron’s horse rolled and threw him, leaving him with two fractured ribs and a broken fibula. Many much younger writers would have given up and called in a helicopter. With the grit of an explorer from an earlier age, Thubron doggedly carries on, riding, limping and boating 3,000 miles along the Amur river. Passing the razor wire and watchtowers of the Russian and Chinese border, he survives military manoeuvres, arrests, police interrogations, threatened deportations and hideous wintry conditions, as he moves slowly through Mongolia, Siberia and Manchuria until he finally reaches the Amur’s Pacific mouth.
The book that he has produced at the end of this ordeal is no less remarkable than the journey itself: a miraculous late-style masterpiece, the equal of any of his earlier works, which will cement his reputation as one of our greatest prose writers in any genre. There is barely a page that does not contain gorgeous descriptive passages, superb dialogue and pitch-perfect commentary founded on deep learning, lightly worn. But The Amur River is not just beautifully written: it is also a work of great importance.
Few will previously have even heard of the river that forms the silvery thread binding this book together; yet Thubron uses it as a metaphor to deal with the relationship
‘The horses’ eyeballs were white and bulging, their hind legs kicking in panic’
of the two countries now regarded by many as the greatest threat to the West in these dying days of the US imperium. Published as China is seizing from America hegemony over Afghanistan, the book could not be more topical.
China and Russia first clashed with one another in 1689 when Russia’s eastward expansion under Peter the Great was met with resistance by the imperial Manchu Chinese army. After massacres on both sides, ambassadors from the two rival states sat down on the banks of the Amur to make a peace treaty. The Russians brought 2,000 men “dressed in cloth of gold and precious furs”. Facing them were 10,000 Chinese in “blazoned brocades ... under huge silk umbrellas”, who arrived on a fleet of junks and barges loaded with cannon. Neither side knew a word of the other’s language, so multilingual Jesuits were brought in to conduct negotiations in Latin. The frontiers laid down by that treaty remained in place until tsarist forces took advantage of Chinese weakness in 1858. In that year, the Russians seized all the land up to the banks of the Amur, with Cossacks forcing any Chinese they found on the north bank into the river at bayonet point. Most drowned in the icy cold of its waters.
Today, Russia and China are close strategic and military allies, but there is little love or even much human contact between the
two. One of Thubron’s most memorable chapters contrasts the bustling Chinese boom town of Heihe with the decaying stupor of Blagoveschensk facing it on the northern bank. The three Russian provinces along the Amur are home to a declining and impoverished population of two million. The three Chinese provinces opposite hold almost 110 million. Russia is heavily in debt to China, and the Chinese have not formally retracted their claim to the territory seized by imperial Russia. The balance of power has now swung heavily in favour of China.
The Amur River is not just a literary triumph in itself, it is also a demonstration of the continued power of great travel writing. In an age when attention spans are growing ever shorter, when articles are becoming more etiolated, the travel book remains one of the few venues to write with some nuance and complexity about a place or an alien culture. A foreign-policy paper or an academic study of an economic data set can minimise differences, and the same phrases, such as “failed states”, are used to link countries that are actually very different, like Yemen and Afghanistan.
The sort of travel book that Thubron has always written, with its depiction of individuals inhabiting a landscape, and its deep knowledge of subjects ranging from Mahayana Buddhism to the whorehouse letters of Anton Chekhov, helps the reader to comprehend massive cultural differences, while also giving the warp and weft of everyday life.
As The Amur River so beautifully demonstrates, good travel writing allows you to use encounters with individuals to suggest complex contradictions within societies and imagine the otherwise unimaginable. Sensitive but never judgmental, Thubron presents a series of lives pinned to paper, like the rare butterflies of a Victorian collector – nomads and herdsmen, victims of Stalinist purges, monks and merchants, ferrymen, librarians and secret policemen. Together, these lives bring a whole world into animated focus.
Despite the internet, there is still no substitute for travel writing of this quality. One can only hope that this epic journey is not Thubron’s last.