Eric Enno Tamm’s first trip to China wasn’t a typical sightseeing getaway, to discover the Great Wall or see the Forbidden City.

Instead, his first look at the country came from the west, from the famed Silk Road city of Kashgar and well into a 2006 trip that saw him traverse Central Asia in the name of a Finnish baron, Gustof Mannerheim.

The product of that trip was a book, The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds, which chronicles the turn-of-the-century journey of Mannerheim, a future president of Finland and spy for Tsar Nicholas II.

A Carleton alumnus and University of Southern California journalism graduate, Tamm discovered the story of the trip through a Finnish friend while completing a master’s degree in Sweden, where he would later live and work for the design magazine Wallpaper.

Mannerheim’s journals detailed the rapid modernization of China — and Tamm was convinced they bore eerie similarities to the rise of China today.

Tamm’s theory did not disappoint. In Mannerheim’s time, foreigners in the city of Kashgar were mostly diplomats and missionaries.

Today, those missionaries are still there, even though it’s illegal to evangelize in China.

“I was quite shocked to find that 70-80 per cent [of the foreigners] were actually Western missionaries,” he said. And no matter what town he went to, churches were being built.

Other similarities, including the rise of technology, of nationalism, education and the burden of corruption, permeate the log of his journey and Mannerheim’s.

“That China has changed is a surprise to no one,” he said, speaking at a presentation of the book Oct. 28, hosted by the Canadian Nordic Society.  

What people don’t realize, Tamm said, is how modern it has already become.

And looking for what challenges China will face next, from the environment to political reform, required a close look at the fate of the Qing Dynasty, he said. The dynasty’s 1912 collapse brought about the Republic of China, and the end of Imperial rule.

Tamm said his book can be read as a cautionary tale, and one that can be hard to find.

“I wanted to understand the country in a more nuanced view, which you can’t really get from reading Western media,” he said.

But Tamm said he hopes the book might have another use some day. A photographer and multimedia enthusiast, he would like to see the images he amassed for the website on the digital page.

“If I had written this book two years from now . . .  a lot of this might be published in an interactive ebook.”