The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds

July 11, 2011
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.

April 1, 2011

A complicated, ambitious travel adventure through modern Inner Asia, tracing the 1906–08 trek by a Russian spy commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II.

The account of the secretive two-year journey undertaken by Baron Gustaf Mannerheim was not published until 1940, when it was highly admired by Hitler. Journalist Tamm (Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, 2004, etc.) only discovered Mannerheim's Across Asia from West to East recently, and embarked on his trip in 2006 to retrace the baron's arduous ethnographic journey through the last years of the Qing Dynasty, when modern currents were eradicating the old order—not unlike the cataclysmic changes shaking China to this day. In 1906, Russia was reeling from its humiliating defeat by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, and enlisted Mannerheim, an officer in the Imperial Army, to undertake the mission through the Asian provinces to gather information on all aspects of Chinese reforms, defensive preparations, politics, colonization and the role of the Dalai Lama (whom Mannerheim got to meet), all in preparation for a possible Russian military incursion. Like Mannerheim, Tamm is intensely curious about the role of China on the world stage, and pursues similar questions about what kind of China will emerge from these wrenching attempts at modernization. Tramping from St. Petersburg to Peking proved a mind-boggling trajectory, penetrating myriad ethnic pockets, Mannerheim by caravan, Tamm by airplane, train, bus and car. Each man encountered all manner of suspicious or friendly people, mishaps and illness. Along the way, Tamm read Mannerheim's diary—"aloof, impersonal and even churlish at times"—to gain a deeper understanding of this singular character.

A well-edited work chronicling a truly inspired journey, leaving readers hopeful about Chinese progress as well as full of questions.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011
The man who would be Finlands leader in WWII, Marshal Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, was Tamms traveling companion for a seven-month journey from St. Petersburg to Beijing. Motivated to undertake the odyssey by the centennial of the barons 190608 reconnaissance of Central Asia and China, conducted in the Russian imperial service, Tamm read Mannerheims account of the mission as he replicated the route. Seeking the past in the present, Tamm sought out tracks taken and sites visited by Mannerheim, discovering that the barons name (its Chinese characters translate as Tamms title) and century-old spying are still remembered, at least by monks and scholars. The garb, personalities, and concerns of drivers, translators, and other transitory friends generate the narrative arc of his travelogue, which is as replete with his pluck and wise observations as any vicarious traveler-reader could wish. Overcoming all obstacles, enduring discomforts of deserts, mountains, and overcrowded buses, Tamm, with his historical and cultural perceptiveness, renders an exquisite portrait of continuities and contrasts in the regions Mannerheim and he traversed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)