BLACK DRAGON RIVER is a personal journey down one of Asia's great rivers. The world's ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with east Asia.

He follows a journey from the river's top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past - and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today.

The long shared history on the Amur has conditioned the way China and Russia behave toward each other - and toward the outside world. To understand Putin's imperial dreams, we must comprehend Russia's relationship to its far east and how it still shapes the Russian mind. Not only is the Amur a key to Putinism, its history is also embedded in an ongoing clash of empires with the West.


亞洲最壯闊的河流之一──黑龍江，也是本書作者齊格勒展開旅行之處。黑龍江在俄羅斯又稱阿穆爾河，為世界第九大河，位於中俄邊境交界。黑龍江在亞洲兩大國的交界上，記者齊格勒帶著相機要來探索這片唯一處於東亞的歐洲邊陲地帶。

齊格勒的旅程從上游到下游，深入認識當地歷史、環境及民族，呈現這地區多麼沉浸於過去，並告訴我們，此地對於現今錯綜複雜的中俄兩國關係至關重要。

阿穆爾河包含了中俄悠久的歷史，也限制了中俄兩國彼此的互動及對外關係。要了解普丁的帝國之夢我們必須先釐清俄羅斯與其遠東地區之間的關係及其如何形塑俄羅斯人的想法。阿穆爾河不只是影響普丁主義的關鍵，其歷史也和帝國與西方之間的衝突有密切關係。