Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  After the Soviet Union’s implosion, khabarovskis demanded the count’s return, and a mold of the original statue was found in the museum vaults. It was now glinting in the sun.

  I asked Nikolay Ivanovich about the turtle and the Chinese connection. He was unexpectedly vehement. “The turtle? It has nothing to do with Chinese culture,” he said. “It was from the tomb of a brilliant Jurchen. The Chinese always called the Jurchen the ‘Enemies from the North.’ They wanted nothing to do with each other. The Jurchen did everything they could to stop the Chinese going north.”

  I was nonplussed. The Jurchen had once ruled much of China. These wild tribes had been able to do that precisely by absorbing the culture of the settled, Sinicized people they vanquished. They even used Chinese characters as the basis for their new script. Centuries later, Arseniev had noted aboriginals who still considered the Son of Heaven, a Chinese import, as their overlord.

  I let the matter drop. But Nikolay Ivanovich was happy to tell me what happened to the turtle under the Soviets.

  “Ah, well, in the 1960s, at the height of tensions with China and all our problems with Mao Zedong, the government did consider the monument to be a Chinese artifact. And so they demoted it. They broke it into pieces, covered the stele in cement, and they exiled the whole lot to Novosibirsk. But then some of our local scientists got wind of this. The turtle had already been strapped onto an open train and was on its way. The scientists caught up with the train and hauled the pieces off. Much later, we could take the turtle out of our vaults, piece it together and put it back where Arseniev had placed it.”

  And the mysterious script under the cement skim? Nikolay Ivanovich looked weary. “I haven’t got round to looking at that.”

  • • •

  The cosmopolitan ecumene did not long survive under Soviet rule, which came to the Russian Far East in 1923. Dalrevkom, the Far Eastern Revolutionary Committee that was the instrument of power in the region, threw up roadblocks around Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok. It began censoring the mail and banned foreign travel. Intellectuals were encouraged to spy on one another. For most zaamurtsy, this was another, most unwelcome country.

  A few intellectuals embraced the new system, declaring support for Marxism and denouncing colleagues. The rest hunkered down, or thought of getting out to nearby Harbin, Kobe, or Shanghai. Ivan Lopatin found an academic post in British Columbia. Arseniev withdrew from public life and died in 1930. But shortly after his death he was accused of fraternizing with the Japanese, the most heinous crime of all. His widow was arrested in 1937 and shot. Their seventeen-year-old daughter was arrested in 1939 on a charge of immorality, released, arrested again in 1940 for conducting anti-Soviet activities, and sentenced to ten years in the gulag. Many former zaamurtsy also disappeared around this time. The huge library at the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok was scattered or burned. Arseniev’s own archives, a passionate lifetime’s work, vanished too.

  • • •

  After the Second World War, an area of abiding international fraternity and solidarity that survived was with China. The Soviet Union had backed the Communists during China’s civil war. After Mao Zedong declared the new People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Soviets returned the naval bases of Port Arthur and Dalian on the Yellow Sea that they had taken from the defeated Japanese at the end of the Second World War. They poured aid and experts into China to foster its rapid industrialization. At the peak in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union was diverting 7 percent of its national income to help China.

  Yet the money masked mounting tensions. Stalin died, of a massive heart attack, in 1953. Consolidating power, in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev rounded on Stalin’s memory, denouncing the dictator’s arbitrariness in seeking out enemies of the people and deploring the hundreds of thousands who had died as a result of it. Khrushchev set in motion a process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, destroying the dictator’s personality cult. In China, Mao Zedong vehemently objected; there were implications for his own authority. In 1959 the Soviet Union chose not to hand over, as they had promised they would, a complete atom bomb, with plans for how to build more. Tensions rippled down the Amur as the two countries moved up tank divisions and infantry. Disputed river islands near Khabarovsk came to assume inflated importance on both sides. Tentative talks to calm things down were broken off in 1964 when Mao Zedong told a visiting group of Japanese Communists that China had yet to lay the bill for the Chinese territories taken by Muraviev at the door of the Russians. By now China had its own atom bomb, and this face-off between two nuclear powers began to alarm the world. On a frozen March day in 1969, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, the tensions erupted into violence on the ice in front of the Ussuri River, just south of Khabarovsk, when Chinese Red Guards ambushed a Russian patrol.

  Sino-Soviet fraternity among scientific colleagues was crumbling. In Russia, references to Ming dynasty voyages down the Amur led by an admiral-eunuch, Yishiha, contracted into “cryptic footnotes,” as John Stephan put it. After bloody border clashes on the Ussuri, anti-Russian rhetoric in China matched the Soviet invective. To Russians the motherland appeared under threat as China’s Communists called the Priamur and the Primorye “historically Chinese possessions.” China’s state news agency declared newfound “close connections” between China and the Amur basin 2,700 years ago. By 1981, the Arctic Ocean was being described as China’s former northern frontier.

  Russia’s archeologists and historians responded in kind. The Liao, Jin, Yuan, and Qing dynasties, Sinicized empires that had all governed at least part of China and sometimes all of it, were stripped of Chinese association and relabeled Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol, and Manchu. In the 1980s, students were being taught that until the nineteenth century no Chinese had ever stepped into the Russian Far East. And in 1972 the KGB drew up a list of 1,200 native place-names for renaming, many of Chinese origin. Towns, villages, rivers, mountains, plains, bays: all were changed. Iman, Waku, and Li Fuzin became Bolshaya Ussurka, Malinovka, and Rudny. Suchan became Partizansk. In the Khabarovsk museum, Chinese inscriptions vanished. The Treaty of Nerchinsk was declared to have been signed under duress, Russia bullied by a hegemonic China. As for Daniel Defoe, who had written that the Amur flowed into a Chinese Ocean, in the Brezhnev era he was condemned as—no more insulting an epithet—“a true bourgeois.”

  CHAPTER 16

  48°19.2' N 134°49.8' E

  It was a still clear early morning, and I was on the Ussuri River as it slid down to meet the Amur, looping around in a great horseshoe bend that played out below the city of Khabarovsk. Though only a tributary of the main river, it was perhaps a quarter of a mile wide. On the north bank, in living memory, some of the Ussuri’s force had worried at the friable banks and gouged a course across the flat sedimented land that ran to the head of the bend, cutting it off and creating an island a dozen miles long and an international dispute. For, previously, China and Russia had agreed that their border should follow the midpoint of the Amur until the mouth of the Ussuri, at which point it would leap to that river and run along the midpoint of the Ussuri upstream for seven hundred miles. A new mouth to the Ussuri complicated the matter, for which stream to choose as the mouth? If a new mouth to the Ussuri was acknowledged, which Russia was quick to do, China might lose a swath of sacred land. In the late 1960s, the new island fed the war fever. Only in 2004 did China and Russia agree on the sensible thing: the border would bisect the new island, putting the western part in China and the eastern one in Russia.

  I was pointing at the island’s Russian bank, crabbing out into the stream in a flat-bottomed rowing skiff. In the stern was Juliana Golobova, a fish scientist in her late twenties, small and alert, with a sideways, impish look, as if expecting the funny side of things. The look persisted as she watched an Englishman—in her boat, on her river—straining to stem the current. In the bows was her boss, Andrei Petrovich Shmigirilov, director of the Khabarovsk fish research
institute, a round man in his sixties who had taken to the water in a leather coat and cap and scuffed city shoes. He leaned with his elbow on the gunwale, smoking languidly as he conned me with laconic instructions toward a buoyed line of nets running across the main stream. Once there I shipped the oars and we pulled ourselves along by the nets, lifting and clearing them as we went. One salmon after another, the biggest the length of my arm, fell into the boat. We had laid the nets not long before, at dawn, when the fish were already running. Now the nets were full. The river teemed with hidden, urgent, abundant life: Oncorhynchus keta, the chum or dog salmon, pushing upstream to spawn.

  They had entered the river from the sea as blue-silver bullets, but now, some days later and several hundred miles upstream, the bright silver was turning to purplish tiger stripes. The hen fish had bulging flanks of roe, and the cock fish were also changing shape. They were growing humpbacks and snarly teeth, and long upturned snouts, as if the misshapen street brawler gets the girl.

  Winter was approaching, hence the primal urgency of the running fish. Yet as we hauled the nets, the waters of the Ussuri had a milky warmth, markedly warmer than Amur waters I had felt to date. Here lies the secret to Amuria’s peculiar natural history. The Amur is doubly notable. First, it is the only one of Russia’s giant river systems that flows east into the Pacific rather than north into the Arctic Ocean. Second, it is fed by two major tributaries, the Songhua and the Ussuri, that come from more temperate lands to the south. In the waters of the Lower Amur you find all the complex of species you would expect of a northern, boreal river: the taimen; four species of anadromous salmon, two of char and two of steelhead; grayling (three species); lenok (two species); and whitefish (two again). But, thanks to the Songhua and the Ussuri, those cold-water animals share a watercourse that mixes and mingles them with a wholly different Sino-Indo-Malayan complex of southern, warm-water species.

  The mix is utterly exotic and unique. Others among the Amur’s 120 fish species include the silver carp, the sharpbelly, the skygazer, the three-lips, the black Amur bream, and the northern snakehead, which survives in mud by drawing its breath from the air. And then there is bighead carp, Aristichthys nobilis, a prehistoric lump of a fish whose swiveling eyes in a huge face are set lower than the corners of a despondent mouth—Andrei Petrovich keeps a forty-five-year-old specimen, Matilda, in a large tank back at his fish institute. In the aquarium, too, are the Amur’s two ancient and endemic species of sturgeon: the Amur sturgeon, Acipenser schrenkii, and its bigger cousin, Huso dauricus, or the kaluga. The institute’s sturgeons are immature specimens a few handbreadths long. They lay slumped at the bottom of the tank. Their scutes—overlapping plates of bony skin—give them a look of prematurely wizened children. The kaluga, in particular, grows huge. When mature, it measures fifteen or twenty feet from nose to tail, and weighs more than a ton.

  At this time of year especially, the Amur and its chief tributaries are a primal soup, thick with wanton life and death. Myriad fish gorge on the tapioca pearls of fish eggs caught up and swept down by the current. Ospreys and bears scavenge for dying fish in the shallows. It is a carnival, but there is an urgency, for soon the river will slow and freeze. In the new year, the eggs of the chum salmon hatch under the gravel as tiny fry, while above them the winter still sets its frozen lid on the river. Come the spring, the fry are off, drifting away downriver to fatten and grow large out in the North Pacific: Amur salmon reach as far as the Oregon coast. Then, five or more years later, they return and press upriver—the cock salmon growing their wicked snouts—to the breeding ground where they themselves were spawned.

  Ashore, among the beech trees, on a fish slab inside a tent that served as a makeshift laboratory, Juliana set to weighing and measuring the fish. She and Andrei wanted to know the age of the fish swimming upstream. They wanted to check for disease, parasites, and toxins. And they wanted to guess at their abundance. With tweezers, Juliana pulled off fish scales and peered at them through a microscope. Faint lines across the scales tell a fish’s age, like the growth rings of trees. With a sharp knife she carved paper-thin sashimi slices of flesh and submitted them to the microscope too. Mature breeding fish, all, and healthy too: no infestations of larvae or other parasites.

  Andrei, dropping ash, seemed satisfied. Annual numbers of the Amur’s three main salmon species fluctuate widely, but for five or six years they have been increasing. The salmon run this year, Andrei drew on his cigarette for effect, would top five million individuals, he said. It was an astonishing number. That such a crowd still pressed up the Amur, among the longest undammed rivers in the world, was extraordinary. You only have to think of the Columbia River, the Pacific Northwest’s longest river, where dams have destroyed the salmon, and the great runs are history. We slid back out on the water for the next haul. The numbers came as a kind of relief. For now, the Amur teemed, and a river force coursed through me too.

  Later, driving back to Khabarovsk with Andrei Petrovich, I pressed him more on the kaluga. The fish had a hold on him, for with talk of kaluga the laconic air is gone. The species was long thought to be a fish only of fresh or brackish waters. But recently—“how little we knew!”—young kaluga have been found ranging up into the Sea of Okhotsk and way down to Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido—Japanese fishermen had written to tell him so.

  Andrei explained the next stage in the kaluga’s life cycle. Once they weigh one hundred or so pounds and are approaching maturity (females are sexually mature at sixteen to seventeen years), kaluga nose their way back to the Amur’s brackish estuary, the liman, constricted by the vast dune island of Sakhalin to the east. Kaluga have close-set eyes pointing forward and a mouth that opens like a windsock. They vacuum up whatever swims in the liman’s current-carved channels: pink and chum salmon, smelt, spawning herring, shrimps. And they grow huge.

  Andrei Petrovich once used to catch many, many kaluga. In the old days, he said, scientific research meant catching and killing without a second thought. But the species grows so slowly, and poaching reached such epic proportions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the kaluga population fell precipitously. A fish mafia, in league with local politicians, was spiriting away the bejeweled eggs in refrigerated trains and planes. Now scientists catch the kaluga, tag them with a microchip and slip them back into the waters. “Finding a kaluga isn’t hard,” said Andrei Petrovich. “Drag a net along the channel bottom, and you know when you’ve come to a kaluga: it’ll stop your boat. Dragging the fish into the boat is another matter. You have to punch it on the nose. Punch it, or it won’t get in.”

  And the poachers? “They had fast boats and lots of fuel. You can see why the district conservation officers were tempted too. Three years ago, the sense was that everybody, yes, everybody, was in on some part of the poaching racket. In the Amur, there are in all about 3,000 tons of kaluga—there used to be four times that. The population that gets fished for—that’s to say, the breeding population of kaluga, the biggest kaluga—is about 1,000 tons. Poachers were taking 750 tons of that. They were fishing out three quarters of the entire breeding population each year. That’s why it’s stopped: there’s hardly any breeding-age fish left.”

  The end of poaching is the good news, of sorts. But a bleaker dimension for the kaluga comes from China. From the late 1970s, when Chinese rushed in to fill the empty lands south of the Amur River, sturgeon hatcheries were started. Wild adult females were hauled out of the river, stuffed with hormones to encourage them to breed, and stripped of their roe. The fry were raised in the hatcheries until the fish were big enough to sell to restaurants around China. It still goes on. It has had an appalling impact on wild populations. The whole two-hundred-mile stretch of the Amur from Khabarovsk up to Amurzet has largely been cleared of kaluga.

  That evening in my hotel room I flicked through the Chinese television channels beamed across the Amur. I stopped at an excited presenter reporting the unexpected capture by Chinese
fishermen of a kaluga weighing six hundred kilos—a monster. The story was not of how every effort was made to help the kaluga back to freedom. Rather, the poor brute was being dragged victoriously up the beach on the way to the breeding station.

  • • •

  Between Khabarovsk and the sea, east of the Amur and its north-flowing tributary, the Ussuri, and running parallel to both, lies the Sikhote-Alin, a folded mountain range six hundred miles long and rarely more than six thousand feet high. Here, on land, you get the same curious mix of biomes that you find in the Amur River itself. At last, the warming balm of the Sea of Japan and of the Pacific beyond begins to temper the harsh continental climate of the Eurasian landmass.

  The forests of the Sikhote-Alin end at the ocean’s edge, and in these the tough, frugal species of the northern taiga merge with unlikely southern ones in a new wet-temperate zone. Summers are muggier, and winters milder. The shallow-rooting conifers of the boreal forest—spruce, larch, and fir—meet with deciduous trees that put down deeper roots in the warmer soil. In the valleys toward the coast, there is a lushness to things: the tall Mongolian oak; the Amur lime with heart-shaped leaves and sprays of cream flowers; a yellow maple, Acer ukurundense; the ashen willow. A thick undergrowth now fills the woods: winged spindlewood, spiraea, rhododendrons, viburnums, and even a species of magnolia. Peonies and iris and lady-slipper orchids grow in damper ground, while meadowsweet fills the summer air. In places the forests are junglelike, a tangle of scrambling vines and honeysuckle. Hydrangeas shoot fifty feet up trees in search of light.

  A fantastic menagerie also dwells in the Sikhote-Alin, as northern and southern mammals meet as nowhere else. Here, the lynx, the wolf, the sable, and the brown bear from the north rub shoulders if not quite lie down with the Manchurian tiger and the Amur leopard in their last redoubts. The gluttonous, dog-size wolverine of the northern taiga scavenges the forest floor; above him glide flying squirrels. And at night the fireflies come out. The first Russians shot at them in terror.