The Amur River: Between Russia and China
COLIN THUBRON
(CHATTO & WINDUS, 304 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

The Amur river, the latest subject of the celebrated travel writer Colin Thubron, is not an easy place to visit. Perhaps the longest river you’ve never heard of, it flows 2,800 miles east towards the Pacific from its source in Mongolia’s Khan Khentii, a forbidden zone filled with thigh-deep bogs, bears and mountains sacred to the memory of Genghis Khan. It’s even tougher when, like Thubron at the beginning of his journey, you’ve just turned 79.

This is quite an age to travel anywhere, let alone thousands of miles through the wildernesses of north-east Asia. But Thubron – author of Behind the Wall, Shadow of the Silk Road and In Siberia – knows this territory well, and in 2018 was drawn back to it by a justified fascination with one of the world’s most critical borderlands.

The river whose route he traces by horse, train, bus, ferry, taxi and fishing boat is, for much of its length, the de facto dividing line between Russia and northern China. It is one of the most heavily fortified waterways in the world, where guards from the two great, mutually wary states eye each other across its silky waters, and is both physically and politically a dangerous place to be. It certainly takes its toll on Thubron: before we’re even a few pages in, he has fallen off his pony and broken his ankle. Later he cracks two ribs when he faints in a sauna; and after accidentally finding his way into the middle of a massive Sino-Russian military exercise, he narrowly avoids arrest as a spy.