Harbin was established by Imperial Russia as an administrative center of the Chinese Eastern Railway on the territory of Qing China, serving the former's expansionist goals in Manchuria until 1917. While the European powers and Japan relied on their naval power to gain access to China's treaty ports, Imperial Russia and its successor the Soviet Union had a direct railway link to North Manchuria, exploiting its natural and human resources to develop the Russian Far East. The collapse of the Qing and Romanov empires, civil wars, warlord rule, international trade, and rivalry between Russia, China, and Japan brought different regimes, cultures, and a unique cosmopolitan flair to Harbin. Mark Gamsa's Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography builds on previous historical studies of Harbin by Rosemary K.I. Quested, Olga Bakich, Søren Clausen, Stig Thøgersen, David Wolff, James H. Carter, Blain R. Chiasson, Georgii V. Melikhov, and Elena P. Taskina, to demonstrate that this city never really became “the Paris of the Orient,” as it was nostalgically dubbed by former residents, visitors, and recent tour guides. Behind the façade of its grand buildings and successful businesses, the two dominant communities of Imperial Russian/Soviet/stateless subjects and Chinese migrants never bridged their differences despite relying on each other in daily life.
Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography tells several stories: one is about the city itself in the context of Manchuria's history; another is about its foreign, predominantly Russian and Chinese communities, their daily interactions and perceptions about each other. Cropped in-between is a life story of Roger Budberg, a Baltic German medical practitioner, who lived and died in Harbin during the early twentieth century. This book does not have a linear narrative, and these three stories overlap. A brief overview of Harbin and Manchuria's past is laid out in the Introduction, while different aspects of Harbin's social history, such as its culture, trade, education, and disruptions caused by wars and political change, appear in several chapters. The analysis of the Sino-Russian interactions is perhaps the strongest part of this book. Chapter One discusses ethnic diversity and overlapping identities among the Russians and the Chinese, who are defined as either the subjects of their multicultural empires or of the emerging nation-states, rather than of one monolithic culture. Chapter Three discusses linguistic, educational, and scholarly aspects of the Sino-Russian interactions in the city, making it clear that there was a shortage of interpreters on both sides and a general unwillingness to understand each other's culture, although a limited number of bilingual mediators emerged in response to growing trade and administrative needs. According to the author, “in Harbin society, the Chinese, not the Russians, were expected to learn the other's language” (79). This gave multiple advantages to those who mastered the Russian language. Chapter Five discusses how social habits, daily interactions, food, and entertainment shaped local communities. Here, religion is covered very briefly. Chapter Seven is about how the Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945 transformed Chinese and Russian lives, forcing people to accommodate to new and often tragic circumstances. The author argues that during the first part of the twentieth century, Harbin was a mixed city, however the contact between the subjects of Russia and China was “limited and reluctant on both sides” (217).
The story of Baron Budberg is discussed in Chapters Two, Four, and Six. Here we learn about the Baltic German nobility with its international network of family members and friends, about Budberg's settling in Harbin right after the Russo-Japanese War, his medical practice as a gynecologist, his role in fighting the plague in Manchuria during two major outbreaks, his embrace of Chinese culture and marriage to a teenage Chinese girl, his death in Harbin in 1926, and his legacy. The choice of Budberg as a “Russian” representative of Harbin's multicultural community of foreigners is unusual. Even though he was a former subject of Imperial Russia and benefited from its colonial outreach in faraway places like Manchuria, he disliked the Russian state and the Russians during his life and had close affinity with ethnic German and other Baltic cultures and with the Lutheran religion. His brief imprisonment by the Russian authorities in 1915 in Harbin as a suspected German spy only made his convictions stronger. He was also critical of the Japanese and the Jews (108), and of Western missionary efforts in China. Budberg was fluent in Russian and German, and he also mastered Chinese, becoming a self-taught and self-proclaimed Sinologist. Despite his Orientalist musings and newly found passion for Chinese culture, he remained, like some European implants in Harbin, in China's treaty ports, and in European colonial outposts in Asia, a person with several identities, who struggled, like Harbin itself, to strike a balance in his daily professional, personal, and spiritual life. Baron Budberg was an oddball, and for this reviewer he was a somewhat displaced tragic figure, similar to European characters portrayed in stories by Somerset Maugham set in the colonial Far East. But at least he served a useful purpose as a doctor and he kept up his interest in Chinese culture for the rest of his life while sticking to his European roots.
As a cross-cultural history of a semi-colonial city and of a former imperial subject, this book will appeal to a broad audience and to those interested in international and urban history, as well as in the history of empires. To those familiar with the history of Harbin, this book may not reveal breakthrough archival sources. However, as interpretative history partially based on Budberg's writings and original papers from his family's collection, it will stand on its own as a powerful testimony to unexpected treasures hidden in transnational histories and as a great story about the vicissitudes of European lives in colonial settings.
