Conceived as a ‘double-track historical biography’, the juxtaposition of the history of Harbin – one of the major cities of North-East China, or, to use its ‘colonial’ name, Manchuria – and one of its inhabitants – the physician Baron Roger Budberg – Mark Gamsa's Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography goes beyond, both in scope and in detail, of any history that has been written about this city and region and the multi-ethnic communities who lived in it. Gamsa's historical narrative starts with the incorporation of the frontier tribes by the Qing dynasty and the Russian expansion to Siberia and the Far East. It is followed by the (Russian) colonial construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) at the brink of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the geopolitical outcomes of the Russo-Japanese War and the October Revolution, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1932, the Soviet invasion of North-East China in 1945 and the final takeover by the Chinese Communist state in 1948. The fate of a multitude of individuals and communities involved in this history gives this narrative a profoundly human dimension.

At its forefront figures the life of Baron Roger Budberg, a German nobleman born on an estate of the Baltic littoral who, after medical studies in Dorpat (Tartu), found himself in Harbin in 1905 as a physician specializing in female diseases and obstetrics. He married, at the age of 40, the 14-year-old Chinese Li, and became, according to his own words ‘fully Sinicized’ (p. 101), a fact that did not prevent his imprisonment as a ‘German spy’ in 1915 and subsequent persecution by Chinese authorities. Based on an impressive number of archival sources, memoirs and letters, the author reconstructs Budberg's life, that of his relatives (some of whom were in the Russian service from Catherine the Great to the White General Kolchak), that of his wife ‘Li-jü-dsehön’ and of his daughter Antoinette/Zhong-De-Hua. But we also meet the Chinese entrepreneurs Ji Fengtai and Zhang Tingge, the ‘Eurasianists’ and ‘Orientalists’ Nikolai F. Ivanov and Ivan I. Serebrennikov, and many others.

The volume is composed of an introduction, followed by eight chapters, an epilogue, 76 pages of notes, a glossary of Chinese terms, a bibliography and an index. It is illustrated by a number of photos and maps, some of which were taken from family albums. Starting with a discussion about the (contested) term of ‘Manchuria’ and its many spellings, followed by a ‘Survey of the scene’, the author presents the aims and method by which he hopes to discover ‘how knowledge, gleaned from a single case, challenges conclusions from an aggregate of cases’ (p. 12). And Gamsa is more than successful. From the chapters devoted to the ‘single case’ of Roger Budberg, his relatives and his wife and daughter to those presenting the biography of other individuals and the various divided communities of the region and the city of Harbin, we understand that for Budberg, as well as for other newcomers – the Chinese included – home was elsewhere: on the banks of the river Memel, Russia or Shandong.

Division is a leitmotiv of the story: Chapter 3, for example, gives evidence of the colonial attitude of the Harbin Russians, for whom the Chinese language ‘was not perceived as a language worth acquiring’ (p. 65). Despite some evidence that members of the Chinese elite were learning Russian, the ‘mutual enriching encounter between East and West’ (p. 74) sometimes voiced by memoirs and scholars is a myth. At the same time, Budberg's fascination with China and Chinese culture, despite his allegiance to his Baltic origins and Tsarist Russia, made China his second homeland. Proof is Budberg and his wife Li's mixed European–Chinese household, Budberg's work as a physician in Harbin where Chinese, including prostitutes, were among his preferred patients, and his numerous pro-Chinese (and often anti-Russian) publications. Perhaps one of the most telling moments of Gamsa's book is Budberg's funeral in August 1926, led by Russian Orthodox, Chinese and Lutheran clergy, Chinese Buddhist monks, Chinese and Russian orchestras and a huge crowd (Chapter 6). Budberg wanted to be buried next to his wife Li, in the Chinese cemetery. But he was buried in the Lutheran section of Harbin's New Cemetery, ‘an apt final statement to the divided city of Harbin’ (p. 173), adds the author.

In addition to the wonderful biographical details of Budberg and his relatives, Gamsa offers fascinating insights into the material and intellectual life of the city, as, for example, in Chapter 3, ‘Intermediaries and channels of communication’ or in Chapter 5, ‘Daily life in a mixed city’. Dress, hair style, sexuality, food, drink, entertainment and religion confirmed the general division between ‘East and West’, but at times there are exceptions, such as Cossacks adopting Chinese skills and clothing on the CER line, or modern Chinese couples looking to European customs and dress, as we learn from the opening sketch ‘The Europa Hotel’ of Xiao Hong's novel Market Street (Shangshi jie, 1936).

The last chapters, devoted to the Russians and Chinese under Japanese occupation, the arrival of the Red Army in Harbin and the examination of what united and divided the ‘Russian’ Kharbin and the Chinese Ha'erbin and their legacy is followed by an epilogue, assessing what remains of the ‘Russian Harbin’: it was and is a city different from any other for both former émigrés and present (Chinese) Ha'erbin ren. As to the story of Baron Roger Budberg, the ‘house built on sand’ that was his new and permanent home was probably not a lone case.