The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road, and the Rise of Modern China

On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Czar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty's sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last czarist agent in the so–called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China's modernization, from education reform and foreign investment to Tibet's struggle for independence.



On July 6, 2006, writer Eric Enno Tamm boards that same train, in...