The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China

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. (May)