The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds:  A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China by Eric Enno Tamm.
From the dustjacket:
     On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Tsar Nicholas II to collect intelligence on the sweeping reforms radically transforming China. The last tsarist agent in the so-called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China's modernization, from education reform, foreign investment and industry to the military, Muslim borderlands and Tibet's struggle for independence.
     On July 6, 2006, author Eric Enno Tamm boarded another train in St. Petersburg, intent on following Mannerheim's 17,000-kilometre route across the Silk Road to Beijing. Discovering both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago, Tamm runs a gauntlet of political and geographic extremes, including some of the world's hottest deserts, cruelest dictatorships and most polluted backwaters.

     Along the way, he offers piercing insights into China's past that raise troubling questions about its future. Can today's Communist China truly be open to the outside world while keeping Western ideas such as democracy and freedom at bay, just as officials mistakenly believed a century ago? What can the reforms of the late Qing Dynasty teach us about the spectacular transformation of present-day China?  Perhaps taking a cue from Confucius ("Study the past if you would divine the future"), Tamm's epic quest becomes a cautionary tale.

Item Condition: This hardcover is in Very Good condition. There are no names or bookplates inside. The pages are clean and the binding is tight. The bottom corners have been bumped and the dustjacket has some minor shelfwear.

Dimensions are approx: 9.25" x 6.25" x 1.5"
This book will ship in a box, with bubble wrap.

Photos are of the actual book that will be shipped.




Marshal Mannerheim Finland Imperial Russia Buddhism Archaeology