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This book offers an intimate portrait of early twentieth-century Harbin, a city in Manchuria where Russian colonialists, and later refugees from the Revolution, met with Chinese migrants. The deep social and intellectual fissures between the Russian and Chinese worlds were matched by a multitude of small efforts to cross the divide as the city underwent a wide range of social and political changes.
Using surviving letters, archival photographs, and rare publications, this book also tells the personal story of a forgotten city resident, Baron Roger Budberg, a physician who, being neither Russian nor Chinese, nevertheless stood at the very centre of the cross-cultural divide in Harbin. The biography of an important city, fleshing out its place in the global history of East-West contacts and twentieth-century diasporas, this book is also the history of an individual life and an original experiment in historical writing.
Told alongside the life of a unique city resident, Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography is the history of Russian-Chinese relations in the Manchurian city of Harbin.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: November 2020
- Pages: 394
Mark Gamsa is an associate professor in the School of History at Tel Aviv University.
"The book is a masterful analysis of the consequences that traumatic shifts in power relations could have for the life of individuals."
N. Pianciola, Nazarbayev University
Slavonic and East European Review
"This is a fascinating and well-researched exploration of the Russian [and] Chinese cultural encounter in Harbin, based on the extensive use of sources in both Russian and Chinese."
Austin Jersild, Old Dominion University
H-Soz-Kult
"Specialists will draw much eclectic material about Harbin from Gamsa and enjoy the author’s often insightful ideas about cross-cultural contact and more."
David Wolff, Hokkaido University
Slavic Review
"There are many reasons to like this book. The writing is elegant, with frequent memorable turns of phrase. The research in Russian, Chinese, and European-language sources is deep and rich, and Gamsa’s feel for his subject is remarkable. One senses on every page his balanced affection for Harbin and even for Budberg, despite his frankness about their many shared imperfections."
Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati
Journal of Modern History
“The book builds on impressive research, contains stimulating discussions of the relationship between biography and general history, and thus deserves to be read not only as the story of a remarkable man but also, more broadly, as a fascinating attempt to understand the life of an individual in the context of his multicultural environment.”
Stig Thøgersen, Aarhus University
H-Net Reviews
“Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography is a remarkable feat of research across multiple languages and archives, as well as a compellingly original, stylishly written, and surprisingly intimate book.”
Edward Tyerman, University of California, Berkeley
Twentieth-Century China
"We have in Mark Gamsa a capable historian who is also something of a poet. It is clear from the high quality of scholarship that he has immersed himself in the history and historiography of Harbin for some time. This book is a refreshing and creative approach to history as a humanity."
James Carter, Professor of History, Saint Joseph’s University
"The unique strength of Mark Gamsa’s contribution to the study of Harbin and Russian‐Chinese relations is the ease with which he moves from the Russian to the Chinese cultural and political scenes. He is able to not only reconstruct in painstaking detail the life of Roger Budberg but also provide a broad sweep of the history of Manchuria in one of the most turbulent eras of modern history. Engaging with archival materials from at least six countries and in at least four languages, the research in this book is superb and of the highest possible quality."
Sergey Glebov, Associate Professor of History, Smith College and Amherst College