The Amur River

'Thubron on top form. Richly detailed, immaculately written and full of insights and encounters that bring a complex corner of the world to life' MICHAEL PALIN 'A masterpiece' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE 'Unforgettable' ANTONY BEEVOR As read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week _______________ A dramatic and ambitious new journey from our greatest travel writer. Rising in the Mongolian mountains and flowing through Siberia to the Pacific, the Amur River forms the tense border between Russia and China. This is the most densely fortified frontier on Earth. In his eightieth year, Colin Thubron takes a dramatic and often treacherous journey from the Amur's secret source to its giant mouth, covering almost 3,000 miles. Harassed by injury and by arrest from the local police, he makes his way along both the Russian and Chinese shores. By the time he reaches the river's desolate end, a whole, pivotal world has come alive. _______________ 'An epic journey along a frozen, fraught frontier... Fascinating' The Times 'This book is a triumph' Daily Telegraph A Financial Times, Sunday Telegraph and Spectator Book of the Year Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 2022

Black Dragon River recounts a personal journey down one of Asia's great rivers. 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 Economist journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with East Asia. Part travel writing, part history, it reveals how the long shared history on the Amur has conditioned the way China and Russia behave toward each other.

'A magnificent achievement' Nikolai Tolstoy, The Times Among the Russians is a marvellous account of a solitary journey by car from St. Petersburg and the Baltic States south to Georgia and Armenia. A gifted writer and intrepid traveller, Thubron grapples with the complexities of Russian identity and relays his extraordinary journey in characteristically lyrical style. This is an enthralling and revealing account of the habits and idiosyncrasies of a fascinating nation along with a sharp and insightful social commentary of Russian life. 'Superb... one of the best books on Russia to appear in years' New York Times

Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that emerged in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for resources. Official histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground caught between rival empires. Zatsepine, by contrast, views it as a unified natural economy populated by Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol people who crossed the border in search of work or trade and who came together to survive a harsh physical environment. This colourful account of a region and its people highlights the often-overlooked influence of frontier developments on state politics and imperial policies and histories.

It began with a spark... A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and a photographer. Their landlord's relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their obsessions and memories. He will also share their fate. The passions of these individuals reach beyond the dying house that holds them. One recalls a lonely childhood, another the cremation grounds of India, another an African refugee camp. But will their stories be consumed forever by the flames?

**TOP TEN BESTSELLER** 'I would rather read Colin Thubron than any other travel writer alive' John Simpson Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity. Isolated beyond the central Himalayas, its summit has never been scaled, but for centuries the mountain has been ritually circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes of Kailas itself. He talks to secluded villagers and to monks in their decaying monasteries; he tells the stories of exiles and of eccentric explorers from the West. Yet he is also walking on a pilgrimage of his own. Having recently witnessed the death of the last of his family, his trek around the great mountain awakes an inner landscape of love and grief, restoring precious fragments of his own past.

A journey along the greatest land route on earth, from the master of travel writing Colin Thubron On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. Covering over 7000 miles in eight months Thubron recounts extraordinary adventures - a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell during the SARS epidemic, undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic in Iran - in inimitable prose. Shadow of the Silk Road is about Asia today; a magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment. 'It is hard to think of a better travel book written this century' Times 'Thubron is the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation' Sunday Telegraph

China has forty major transboundary watercourses with neighbouring countries, and has frequently been accused of harming its downstream neighbours through its domestic water management policies, such as the construction of dams for hydropower. This book provides an understanding of water security in Asia by investigating how shared water resources affect China’s relationships with neighbouring countries in South, East, Southeast and Central Asia. Since China is an upstream state on most of its shared transboundary rivers, the country’s international water policy is at the core of Asia’s water security. These water disputes have had strong implications for China’s interstate relations, and also influenced its international water policy alongside domestic concerns over water resource management. This book investigates China’s policy responses to domestic water crises and examines China’s international water policy as well as its strategy in dealing with international cooperation. The authors describe the key elements of water diplomacy in Asia which demonstrate varying degrees of effectiveness of environmental agreements. It shows how China has established various institutional arrangements with neighbouring countries, primarily in the form of bilateral agreements over hydrological data exchange. Detailed case studies are included of the Mekong, Brahmaputra, Ili and Amur rivers.