Beyond the Amur

Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that developed in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for resources. Although official imperial histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground between rival empires, this colourful history of a region and its people tells a different story. Drawing on both Russian and Chinese sources, Victor Zatzepine shows that the border between the Russian Far East and Manchuria remained porous. Neither Russia nor China could control the flow of goods, people, or ideas into the region. Various peoples – Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol – crossed the border in pursuit of work and trade, exchanging ideas and knowledge as they adapted to the harsh physical environment. Much to the chagrin of bureaucrats, whose loyalties remained tied to distant capitals, trade, railways, and towns flourished in step with a distinctive regional culture. By viewing the Amur as a unified natural economy caught between two empires, Zatsepine highlights the often-overlooked influence of regional developments on imperial policies and the importance of climate and geography to local, state, and imperial histories.