The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds

Two epic adventures along the Silk Road—a century apart—offer a cautionary tale about China’s rise in the modern age: “A wonderful book” (Wade Davis). “A complicated, ambitious travel adventure through modern Inner Asia . . . a truly inspired journey.” —Kirkus Reviews 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 in order to retrace Mannerheim’s route across the Silk Road. Along the way, Tamm discovers both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago. He offers piercing insights into China’s past that raise troubling questions about its future. 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.”