The horse that leaps through clouds

Two epic journeys along the Silk Road, past and present, offer a riveting and cautionary tale about the breathtaking rise of 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 Tam.