“Tamm’s writing deftly conveys readers from 1906 to 2006, from St. Petersburg to Beijing, intertwining his own experiences with those of Mannerheim,” writes Amy Reger, a Uyghur human rights activist in a book review in the Asia Sentinel. “His prose and dry wit, which earned him the 2011 Ottawa Book Award for Non-fiction, sustains readers masterfully through a grand scope of nearly 500 pages,”

“The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds,” she concludes, “goes far beyond clichéd notions of the Silk Road and the modern rise of China, and imparts to readers a discerning look into the marginalized people and groups living on the geographical and economic edges of Chinese society. The book is unique in its understanding of the methods of control used by paranoid leaders attempting to maintain power in the face of myriad forms of discontent. The travels and observations of both Tamm and Mannerheim outline the mundane difficulties and the more agitated discord created by regimes slow to embrace political reform but, in China’s case at least, experiencing tumultuous economic reforms. It is left to the reader to predict whether or not the side effects of Beijing’s reticence to embrace fundamental reforms will take cues from history, and how those living on China’s periphery will react to continued pressure from above.”

Click here to read the full review.

It was quite an honour to be nominated as a finalist among such a distinguished group, literary icons who’ve published wonderful works on the icons and iconography of this country. I feel incredibly honoured, not to mention lucky, to have won the award.

The jury, consisting of John Geddes, Sarah Jennings and Kerry Pither, said that, in the book, I build “toward a memorable portrayal of the state of modern China. Tamm’s account, which combines vivid travelogue, historic inquiry and personal essay, richly rewards readers with a rare blend of epic sweep and intimate meditation.”

In my acceptance speech, I thanked the citizens of Ottawa for their support of the arts, especially at this gloomy time when the arts are, in fact, especially important. I also thank my partner and my father, who recently passed away. He gave me a passion for history and a flair for storytelling. He lives on in my books.

I also dedicated my award to a fellow writer, Nurmuhemmet Yasin, whom I write about in my book. He is a Muslim Uyghur writer who is about my age from Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis in China’s western frontier. In 2004, he wrote a story titled “Wild Pigeon” for the Kashgar Literary Review. The Chinese government read it as an allegory for their harsh and brutal rule over their Muslim borderlands and imprisoned Yasin for 10 years. Compared to Yasin, my own travails in researching and writing this book are the equivalent of a weekend at Disney World.

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A complicated, ambitious travel adventure through modern Inner Asia, tracing the 1906–08 trek by a Russian spy commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II.

The account of the secretive two-year journey undertaken by Baron Gustaf Mannerheim was not published until 1940, when it was highly admired by Hitler. Journalist Tamm (Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, 2004, etc.) only discovered Mannerheim’s Across Asia from West to East recently, and embarked on his trip in 2006 to retrace the baron’s arduous ethnographic journey through the last years of the Qing Dynasty, when modern currents were eradicating the old order—not unlike the cataclysmic changes shaking China to this day. In 1906, Russia was reeling from its humiliating defeat by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, and enlisted Mannerheim, an officer in the Imperial Army, to undertake the mission through the Asian provinces to gather information on all aspects of Chinese reforms, defensive preparations, politics, colonization and the role of the Dalai Lama (whom Mannerheim got to meet), all in preparation for a possible Russian military incursion. Like Mannerheim, Tamm is intensely curious about the role of China on the world stage, and pursues similar questions about what kind of China will emerge from these wrenching attempts at modernization. Tramping from St. Petersburg to Peking proved a mind-boggling trajectory, penetrating myriad ethnic pockets, Mannerheim by caravan, Tamm by airplane, train, bus and car. Each man encountered all manner of suspicious or friendly people, mishaps and illness. Along the way, Tamm read Mannerheim’s diary—”aloof, impersonal and even churlish at times”—to gain a deeper understanding of this singular character.

A well-edited work chronicling a truly inspired journey, leaving readers hopeful about Chinese progress as well as full of questions.

Eric Enno Tamm’s The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road, and the Rise of Modern China (Douglas & McIntyre) is a fascinating, sweeping combination of history and travelogue.

Tamm takes as his starting point Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, one of those intriguing footnote figures: Russian spy, last Regent of Finland, the recipient of a birthday visit from Adolf Hitler.

On July 6, 1906, Mannerheim set out on a secret mission, charged by Nicholas II to report on China’s increasing power. The Baron traveled through Central Asia on the ancient Silk Road connecting East and West.

Exactly one hundred years later, Tamm duplicated as closely as possible Mannerheim’s journey. Along the way, he visited Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, encountering despotic, brutal regimes, allies of the West in the so-called War on Terror. The area’s plentiful oil and gas reserves also helps in making friends.

Then Tamm finds his way to China itself as he addresses the same questions as Mannerheim did: what kind of role will China play in the contemporary world?

Tamm has also put together an impressive website for this compulsively readable book (www.horsethatleaps.com) with maps and some of the three thousand photographs he took on the trip.

A century ago, Gustaf Mannerheim and Paul Pelliot took a portait with Kurmanjan Datka, the Queen of Alai, near Chigirchiq Pass. A century later, Eric Enno Tamm (far left) posed for a photograph with Sardarbek Ismailov (second from left), the great grandson of Kurmanjan Datka, and his relatives in a yurt atop Chigirchiq Pass.

Book review by George Fetherling in Diplomat magazine.

There’s a connection to be made between Pearl Buck in China and The Horse That Leaps through Clouds (Douglas & McIntyre, $34.95), a wonderfully fat new work of travel and history by Eric Enno Tamm, of Ottawa. As the 19th Century melted into the 20th, writes the author, “Western technology and imported consumer goods — along with radical political ideas, democracy and Christianity — were spreading to every corner of the Chinese Empire,” eliciting not joy but fear in Western capitals. One result was the so-called Great Game (the term popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim) in which Imperial Russia and Britain, along with France and some other European players, tried to out-spy one another to get control of Central Asia’s oil and other resources (a story well told in The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia and other works by Peter Hopkirk).

Just as this tomfoolery was winding down, Russia sent Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim on a two-year espionage mission from St. Petersburg to the farthest reaches of northern and western China. In later life, Mannerheim (1867−1951) became a controversial national hero in his native Finland and, for a time, its prime minister.

But, in 1906, he was a colonel in the tsar’s service, posing as an ethnographer and travelling with 16 steamer trunks on a mission that would last two years. Mr. Tamm sets out to retrace his famous predecessor’s steps, following the same path across, for example, Eurasia, that “vast continent ruled by a bizarre patchwork of oil-soaked aristocrats, one outlandishly ruthless crackpot and the world’s last major Communist regime and rising superpower.”

A sophisticated journalist indeed, Mr. Tamm gathers observations like gemstones as he crosses “a gauntlet of political and geographical extremes, including some of the world’s hottest deserts, highest mountains and cruellest dictatorships” stretching 17,000 kilometres. He is too clever to pretend he can intuit the future, but he clearly sees the present reflected in the past. For example, he notes while crossing Uzbekistan that “Khanates of blended races and tongues traditionally ruled Inner Asia. People identified themselves according to their local oases, their ruling dynasties and their allegiance to Islam. That didn’t quite fit the Soviet concept of nationality.”

Click here to download the full book review.

The seemingly only thing Chairman Mao and Santa Claus have in common is an infatuation with the colour red. After all, only a short time ago Ye Olde Saint Nick and his merry elves would have been attacked as counterrevolutionaries and agents of Western Imperialism in Communist China. But change is now fast afoot in China.

In 2006, I stayed in Beijing for two months over the Christmas season. The day I arrived at the Soho high-rise complex in the city’s Central Business District, crews were erecting a ten-metre-tall Christmas tree in its plaza. My local supermarket, not far away, was festooned with Christmas decorations: Santa portraits, red and green banners, ornaments, fake Christmas trees, tinsel. I strolled the well-stocked aisles listening to “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” Cashiers wore velvety elf hats. Beijing was awash in Santa’s favourite colour—evidence of both a spiritual and consumer revolution sweeping the country.

Dialectical materialism—the Marxist theory that social conflicts over material needs are the driving force of history—is unraveling in China and being overshadowed by a new dialectic. The Communist Party has been so successful at meeting the material needs of its 1.3 billion citizens—at least for now—that many Chinese are finding themselves spiritually wanting. Economic growth rates are being eclipsed by the even more meteoric growth in the number of religious believers—primarily evangelical Christian converts, but also Buddhists, Taoist and Muslims.

The contradictory, yet complimentary forces of materialism and spirituality, like yin and yang, are profoundly shaping the country and present one of the greatest challenges to Communist rule.

Lets start with the temporal: the reform movement launched in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping has lifted a quarter of a billion Chinese out of poverty. Everyone’s plight is improving, which is one reason why the Chinese, up to this point, have shown such a high level of tolerance for official corruption and grotesque levels of inequality. The legitimacy of the Communist Party rests largely on its ability to deliver jobs and rising incomes. Should that falter there could be trouble, as a restive population grows resentful towards the regime’s corruption, greed and failures.

Yet China’s rulers are damned if they do deliver economic growth and damned if they don’t. Here’s why: With their material needs met, an increasing number of Chinese have come to realize that they still aren’t happy.

“After the Cultural Revolution, there was a collapse in the Chinese belief system,” Linda, a student in Lanzhou, told me. “People are improving their material wealth. They are making a lot of money, but they are confused. They don’t know what will make them happy.”

She took me to the Catholic cathedral in downtown Lanzhou where we met a young priest. “People really need something spiritual to sustain them,” he told us. “There’s now a crisis of belief among the Chinese. In the past, people were forced to believe in Marxism and its propaganda. Some people have come to realize that Marxist ideology isn’t so helpful in their daily lives.”

During my six months traveling through China, I witnessed a country in the midst of a religious awakening. Even the Catholic church—as battered and emaciated as it is in the West—is growing in China. Wherever I travelled, I heard stories about underground house churches and saw churches and temples under construction.

In Jiuquan, near the western terminus of the Great Wall, I came across worshippers putting the finishing touches on a new church that could hold fifteen hundred people. “Hallelujah!” one old guy exclaimed as I entered the churchyard. One fifty-year-old woman, in her Sunday best, was wielding a pick axe, chipping away at old concrete to make way for a garden. Christianity is indeed blooming in China.

In the blighted industrial town of Taiyuan, I met a Western missionary who told me that many Chinese students talk about kongxu, or their “emptiness.”

“There is a crisis of faith,” the missionary told me. “There was a value system and it had a shiny head and red star. It collapsed and the emperor wore no clothes.” The Chinese are now groping to fill that void. “There’s an emptiness in people’s hearts,” he went on. “After 1989 [and the Tiananmen Square massacre], people said ‘You can’t put faith in the Party anymore.’ ”

In business-speak, missionaries are exploiting a gap in the spiritual marketplace. Evangelicals offer an irresistible two-for-one deal: the promise of a better life and a better afterlife. This offering—a blending of commerce and Christianity—is gaining loyal customers.

In 2010, the official number of Christians in China surpassed 28 million, but is likely as high as 90 million if the estimated number of worshippers at unofficial house churches is counted. “Nearly 69 percent of believers said they converted to Christianity after either they or members of their family fell ill,” reported Li Lin, a researcher for the state-run Institute of World Religions which conducted a survey of religious worshippers in China. The survey found that the ecclesiastical boom is tied to China’s economic boom. It noted that 73 percent of Chinese Christians joined the church after 1993, and nearly 18 percent of them between 1982 and 1992.

It would be wrong to just dismiss Beijing’s Yuletide decorations as meaningless marketing ploys of cynical shopkeepers. It is certainly that, but it’s also much more. Paradoxically, the material success of China’s godless rulers has set the conditions for a spiritual reawakening in the country.

At the same time, Beijing gravely fears the divided loyalties of religious worshippers, as witnessed by their attempts to control Catholic and Protestant churches in China and brutally suppress Falun Gong.

And so, red is once again the revolutionary colour of China. This time, however, it is not emblazoned on banners and a little book of quotations, but on the nose of a reindeer named Rudolf.

Writers at Vancouver’s Georgia Straight picked 15 books that “did the most to capture our imagination and get us talking… they’ve stuck with us the closest, and loom largest in our memory.” The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds was picked as one of them. Here’s what the reviewer Alexander Varty has to say:

Using Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim’s early-20th-century journey into the wilds of central Asia as his template, Canadian author Eric Enno Tamm embarks on a multifaceted exploration of the Great Game as it was played then and as it is being played today. Statesman, ethnographer, and Russian spy, Mannerheim is a fascinating character, but Tamm’s most gripping conclusions have to do with China’s commercial and territorial ambitions, which have not changed much despite the country’s transformation from imperial power to industrial giant.

Read full review »

TheTyee.ca recommends The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds for “the person who likes to read spy stories alone in Chinese restaurants.” The reviewer goes on: “A Russian agent sets forth on orders to document China’s modernization and is stunned to see what’s going on there — in 1906. That yarn is intertwined with Tamm’s first-hand reporting on China today in a brilliantly complex piece of non-fiction storytelling.”

Gustaf Mannerheim met the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thupten Gyatso, at the holy mountain of Wutai Shan in 1908.

“The Chinese authorities seem to guard the Dalai Lama closely,” Baron Gustaf Mannerheim wrote in his diary in July 1908. The Russian colonel, who was on a secret intelligence-gathering mission in China, had just arrived at Wutai Shan, the most sacred of four Buddhist mountains in China. One of its mountaintop temples was, he wrote, “the present abode, not to say prison, of the Buddhists’ pope, the Dalai Lama.”

A Chinese army captain named Wang told Mannerheim that “a cordon of soldiers” guarded the approaches to Wutai Shan in northeast Shanxi province. In the event of an attempt to escape, Wang explained, the Dalai Lama “would be stopped, by armed force if necessary.” But in his wanderings around Wutai Shan, Mannerheim saw no such cordon. “I could not help noticing, however, that [Wang] watched my movements with the greatest interest.”

Wang urged Mannerheim to take him as his interpreter during his audience with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. But a Tibetan prince had already secretly informed Mannerheim that Wang was not welcome. The Tibetans despised Wang, whom they considered a spy, and prohibited him and his troops from the inner precincts of the temple.

Wutai Shan was more podium than prison for the Dalai Lama. Upon arriving here in the spring of 1908, His Holiness sent messages to the Peking Legations inviting envoys to visit. William Woodville Rockhill, the American ambassador to China, was the first. He pulled on his walking boots and set out for Wutai Shan on foot, a five-day trek from Peking. Rockhill was a scholar and diplomat who had explored Inner Asia in the 1890s and spoke Tibetan. He had left Wutai Shan only a day before Mannerheim’s arrival.

“The Talé Lama seems to me a man of undoubted intelligence, open-minded… a very agreeable, kindly, thoughtful host, and a personage of great dignity,” Rockhill reported back to President Theodore Roosevelt. The Dalai Lama told Rockhill about his struggles against the Chinese and how his country’s remoteness meant Tibet had “no friends abroad.” Rockhill assured His Holiness that he was mistaken: Tibet had many foreign well-wishers who hoped to see Tibetans “prosper and happy.” Later, during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Peking, Rockhill became a confidant to the Tibetan leader, quietly pushing a rapprochement with the Chinese.

In the summer of 1908, the Dalai Lama received a parade of envoys: a German doctor from the Peking Legation; an English explorer named Christopher Irving; R.F. Johnson, a British diplomat from the Colonial Service; and Henri D’Ollone, a French army major and viscount. The Dalai Lama hoped to patch up his relations with Britain after its invasion of Lhasa in 1904 and bolster his international standing. These first audiences with the mysterious Buddhist pontiff were much anticipated.

On his second day in Wutai Shan, a messenger ran into Mannerheim’s room in the Tayuan Temple and gestured that the Dalai Lama was ready to receive him. Mannerheim duly prepared himself. While he was shaving and changing his clothes, another frantic messenger arrived to express the Dalai Lama’s impatience. “I was just as impatient,” he wrote, “but could not possibly dress any faster.” A few minutes later, an anxious Tibetan prince appeared to ask what Mannerheim meant by keeping His Holiness waiting. At a swift pace, the Baron and prince climbed the steep staircase to Pusading Temple.

Staircase to the Pusading Temple in Wutai Shan

Wang, in full dress uniform, was waiting at the top with a Chinese honour guard. The Chinese had reason to worry about Mannerheim’s visit. Chinese authorities had just arrested two Russian military officers who were inciting the Mongols to break from China and become a Russian protectorate. During his stay in Urga (now Ulan Baatar), the Dalai Lama sent messages to the Tsar through various envoys. His Holiness told one Russian military intelligence officer that both Tibet and Mongolia should “irrevocably secede from China to form an independent allied state, accomplishing this operation with Russia’s patronage and support, avoiding bloodshed.” If Russia wouldn’t help, the Dalai Lama insisted, he would even ask Britain—his former foe—for help. After his visit with the Dalai Lama, Mannerheim, in fact, trekked to Inner Mongolia to gauge the rebellious mood of the Mongols.

Wang could barely hide his wrath when Mannerheim told him that he could not attend his audience with the Tibetan pontiff. The Chinese captain argued with two of the Dalai Lama’s assistants. As the Baron slipped into a small reception hall, he caught sight of Wang “making vain efforts to force his way in behind me.”

The Dalai Lama sat on a gilded armchair placed on a dais along the back wall of the small room. Two old Tibetans, unarmed, with beards and hair speckled with grey stood behind him. The Dalai Lama was frocked in “imperial yellow with light-blue linings” and a “traditional red toga.” The thirty-three-year-old pontiff had a dark brown face, shaved head, moustache and a tuft of hair under his lower lip. His eyes were large and his teeth gleamed. Mannerheim noticed “slight hollows in the skin of his face, which are supposed to be pockmarks.” He appeared a bit nervous, “which he seems anxious to hide.” Otherwise, Mannerheim thought he was “a lively man in full possession of his mental and physical faculties.”

Mannerheim made a “profound bow,” which the Dalai Lama acknowledged with a slight nod. They exchanged silk scarves. His Holiness began with small talk, asking Mannerheim about his nationality, age and journey. The Dalai Lama then paused and, twitching nervously, asked if the Tsar had sent a secret message for him. “He awaited the translation of my reply with obvious interest,” wrote Mannerheim, who informed him that he hadn’t the opportunity to personally speak with Tsar Nicholas II before his departure. The Dalai Lama then gestured, and a beautiful piece of white silk with Tibetan letters was brought out. It was a gift that Mannerheim was to deliver personally to Nicholas II.

The Dalai Lama told Mannerheim he had been enjoying his journeys in Mongolia and China, but “his heart was in Tibet.” Many Tibetans were urging him to return. His officials claimed up to twenty thousand pilgrims visited the Dalai Lama each month, but Mannerheim thought it was “an undoubted exaggeration.” The Tibetan pontiff was in the midst of a showdown with Empress Dowager Cixi, who wanted him to come to Peking to perform the kowtow. The Dalai Lama, Mannerheim wrote, “does not look like a man resigned to play the part the Chinese Government wishes him to, but rather like one who is only waiting for an opportunity of confusing his adversary.” The wily Tibetan pontiff had postponed his journey so many times that a joke was circulating in Peking referring to him as the “Delay Lama.”

Mannerheim spoke encouragingly about Russia’s sympathies for Tibet’s struggles against the Chinese. Russia’s troubles were over, the Baron assured him, and “the Russian Army was stronger than ever.” Now, all Russians watched His Holiness’s footsteps with great interest, he added. The Dalai Lama, Mannerheim recalled, “listened to my polite speeches with unconcealed satisfaction.”

Twice the Dalai Lama ordered his bodyguards to check if Wang was eavesdropping on their conversation. It was a dangerous time for the Dalai Lama, who knew his life may be in danger if he returned to Lhasa. The Chinese were tightening their grip on Tibet. Lamas were being assassinated, monasteries plundered and Tibetans evicted from their nomadic pastures. Peking needed the Dalai Lama to be a compliant vassal who could calm his restless followers and ease Tibet’s incorporation into the Chinese Empire.

But the Dalai Lama proved defiant. He visited Peking that September and immediately fell out with the Imperial Court, which issued a decree demoting him to “a loyal and submissive Vicegerent bound by the laws of the sovereign state.” A prominent Imperial censor also openly denounced him as “a proud and ignorant man.” Rumours spread in Tibet that he had been assassinated. Outraged at various reforms, lamas threatened a “holy war” against the Chinese. By the end of 1908, a rebellion broke out, leading to the defeat of Chinese troops. The Dalai Lama eventually returned to Lhasa in 1909 and sent telegrams to Britain and all European countries attacking Peking’s claim over Tibet.

In February 1910, Chinese troops invaded Lhasa. The Dalai Lama fled to India. An Imperial decree denounced His Holiness as “an ungrateful, irreligious obstreperous profligate who is tyrannical and so unacceptable to the Tibetans, and accordingly an unsuitable leader of Lamas.” After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, His Holiness returned to Tibet in 1913, declaring the country independent. He died in 1933, leaving a prophetic last testament for the next Dalai Lama:

We must guard ourselves against the barbaric red communists… the worst of the worst. It will not be long before we find the red onslaught at our own front door… and when it happens we must be ready to defend ourselves. Otherwise our spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated… and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.

Recognizing the clear and present danger, Mannerheim offered the Dalai Lama an unusual, though practical, gift: a Browning revolver. The Baron apologized that he didn’t have a better offering, but explained that after two years’ journey he had no other items of value. The Dalai Lama laughed, “showing all his teeth,” as Mannerheim showed His Holiness how to quickly reload seven cartridges into the revolver. The Dalai Lama relished the demonstration. “The times were such,” Mannerheim wrote, “that a revolver might at times be of greater use, even to a holy man like himself, than a praying mill.”

From The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China by Eric Enno Tamm. Copyright © 2010 by Eric Enno Tamm. Published by arrangement with Douglas & McIntyre.