Amur River 黑龙江

choi

Howard W French, How the East Was Won; Russia’s Asian hinterland is overshadowed by the country’s much smaller European component.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-east-was-won-1450925530
(book review on Dominic Ziegler, Black Dragon River; A journey down the Amur River at the borderland of empires. Penguin, 2015)

Note:
(a) "Dominic Ziegler makes the powerful case that this Asian Russia has been wrongly overshadowed by the country’s much smaller European component."

The "European component" refers to European portion of Russia.
(b) "as Mr Ziegler demonstrates, it was pressures from the east that created the Russia that we know, both in terms of its expansive imperial geography and its national temperament. 'Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar,' he writes, adopting a quote attributed to Napoleon."

Jennifer Speake (ed), The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. 6th ed. Oxford University Press, 2015, at 277
https://books.google.com/books?i ... 20Tatar&f=false
(“SCRATCH a Russian and you find a Tartar[:] An assertion that the Russians, under a veneer of civilization, are still basically the marauding barbarian nomads of the steppes. The proverb is also used allusively especially of other nationalities. Cf. Fr[ench]. grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tartare, Scratch the Russian and you find the Tartar, which is attributed to Napoleon")

(c) "Outside of Russia, the Amur enjoys little of the fame of the Nile or the Amazon, and one comes away from this book with a keen appreciation for how undeserving this relative anonymity is. 'At 2,826 miles,' he writes, 'it is longer than the Congo or the Mekong.' Other Russian rivers, like the Ob, the Lena and the Yenisei, which together form an immense network with the Amur, he explains, each drain expanses of land as large as Western Europe.
(i) Congo River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_River
(world's deepest river with measured depths in excess of 220 m (720 ft); The Congo-Chambeshi river has an overall length of 4,700 km (2,920 mi), which makes it the ninth longest river; section 1 Name)
(ii) Mekong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong
(estimated length is 4,350 km (2,703 mi); section 1 Names)
(iii)
(A) Lena River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_River
("is the easternmost of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean (the other two being the Ob [westernmost] and the Yenisei [situated in between Ob and Lena Rivers]). It is the 11th longest river in the world [4,472 km (2,779 mi)] * * * It is commonly believed that the Lena derives its name from the original Even-Evenk 鄂温克族 name Elyu-Ene, which means 'the Large River' ")
(B) Ob River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ob_River
(section 1 Names)
(C) Yenisei River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenisei_River
(is the central of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean)

choi

(d) "Early on, Russia’s eastward orientation was hardly a matter of choice. Like much of Europe, Russia came under assault from Mongol conquerors in the 13th century. Russian princes maintained semi-autonomy only by paying them lucrative tribute, but when the Mongol tide finally receded, around 1582, Russia turned its own energies eastward, building frontier forts and trading posts. Initially, this was mostly a matter of defense, as Moscow sought to control ever more distant approaches to the Russian heartland. With time, though, other motives took hold. First came food, in the form of hearty and boundless river fish; then lucre, in the form of seemingly endless supplies of sable, the so-called 'soft gold' that was hunted almost to extinction. After that followed, beginning around 1800, a similar pursuit of fur seals that were killed in numbers reminiscent of the slaughter of American buffalo."
(i) Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia
("The establishment of the first East Slavic states in the 9th century [Kievan Rus' (882–1240; capital  Kiev)] * * * Ultimately Kievan Rus' disintegrated, with the final blow being the Mongol invasion of 1237–40[53] that resulted in the destruction of Kiev and the death of about half the population of Rus'. The invading Mongol elite, together with their conquered Turkic subjects (Cumans, Kipchaks, Bulgars), became known as Tatars, forming the state of the Golden Horde [1240s–1502], which pillaged the Russian principalities
(ii) "around 1582, Russia turned its own energies eastward"
(A) Siberia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia
(section 1 Etymology)
(B) Khanate of Sibir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanate_of_Sibir
(1490–1598;  Its conquest by [Cossack] Yermak Timofeyevich in 1582 was the beginning of the Russian conquest of Siberia)

Quote: "The Russian conquest of Kazan in 1552 * * * [khan] Kuchum [of Khanate of Sibir] * * * conduct[ed] a raid on the Stroganov [a Russian merchant family] trading posts resulted in an expedition led by the Cossack Yermak against the Khanate of Sibir. Kuchum's forces were defeated by Yermak at the Battle of Chuvash Cape in 1582 and the Cossacks entered Iskar [capital of the Jhanate] later that year. Kuchum reorganized his forces, killed Yermak in battle in 1584, and reasserted his authority over Sibir. Over the next fourteen years, however, the Russians slowly conquered the Khanate. In 1598 Kuchum was defeated on the banks of the Ob and was forced to flee to the territories of the Nogai, bringing an end to his rule.

* It was in the reign (1547-1584) of Tsar Ivan the Terrible/ Ivan IV. Yet Russian government did not dispatch Yermak; The Stroganovs did.
(iii) hearty (adj): "2b
(1) : [of a person] having a good appetite
(2) : abundant, rich, or flavorful enough to satisfy the appetite"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hearty
(iv) lucre (n; from Latin [noun neuter] lucrum profit): "monetary gain :  PROFIT <wrote almost entirely for lucre>; also :  MONEY"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lucre
(v)
(A) fur trade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur_trade

Please read section 1 Russian fur trade -- but not section 1.1 Siberia, because what you need only to know from section 1.1 is the following:

"Furs would become Russia's largest source of wealth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. * * * Russia did not have sources of gold and silver, but it did have furs, which became known as 'soft gold' and provided Russia with hard currency. The Russian government received income from the fur trade through two taxes, the yasak (or iasak) tax on natives [in the form of pelts, not money] and the 10% 'Sovereign Tithing Tax' imposed on both the catch [by ethnic Russians] and sale of fur pelts. Fur was in great demand in Western Europe, especially sable and marten, since European forest resources had been over-hunted and furs had become extremely scarce. * * * The high prices that sable, black fox, and marten furs could generate in international markets spurred a ‘fur fever’  [as opposed to gold fever in US] in which many Russians moved to Siberia as independent trappers. * * * From 1620 to 1680 a total of 15,983 trappers operated in Siberia.

(B) Somehow the "fur seal" was "northern fur seal" -- view only the map in northern fur seal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_fur_seal
-- on the Pacific coasts of Siberia and North America (including Alaska), rather than fresh-water Baikal seal.

choi

(e) "In Mr Ziegler’s telling, the American comparison [about American buffalo], it turns out, is far more than incidental. Russia was one of the world’s last great geographical empires to take form, and Moscow’s geopolitical dreams were consciously inspired in part by observing America’s westward expansion. 'In Moscow and St Petersburg, Russians consumed the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, chronicler of the American frontier,' Mr Ziegler writes. 'The newspapers were full of tales of the California gold rush [1848–1855] that was then under way. . . . the [Amur] River would be Russia’s Mississippi. The supposedly lush region the Amur River drained was to be a new America.'
(i) James Fenimore Cooper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fenimore_Cooper
(1789 – 1851; lived most of his life in Cooperstown [presently a village], New York, which was founded by his father William [who had purchased in 1785 and later became a county judge]; noted for five historical novels of the frontier period known as the Leatherstocking Tales, the second of which was The Last of the Mohicans)
(ii) The frontier in Cooper's novels were not the (American) West, but in upstate New York.

The Last of the Mohicans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans
(published in 1826; was set in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War); section 1 Historical background; section 3 Characters: Chingachgook and his son Uncas (who died in a fight) : section 6 Legacy)

* In the novel, the entire Mohican tribe was wiped out, except one.
(iii) The word "Mohican" is actually a misnomer. See Mohegan people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohegan_people
(section 5 Confusion Among Tribal Names: "Although similar in name, the Mohegan are a different tribe from the Mahican * * * In the United States, both tribes have been referred to in various historic documents by the spelling 'Mohican,' based on mistakes in translation and location)

choi

(f) "Pushing east eventually brought the Russians into uneasy contact with another great, late expanding empire, China’s Qing Dynasty, with which Moscow signed a treaty on territorial matters that was so evenhanded that neither empire’s language was used during the negotiations. Rather, in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, Latin was."

Treaty of Nerchinsk 尼布楚条約
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nerchinsk

Read introduction, then search the text for "Latin."

(g) " 'There’s eight million Russians in the Russian Far East,' a man named Vasily tells the author [Ziegler]. 'And the same number of Chinese. That is not what the government tells you, but * * * The Chinese, they’re everywhere' "
(i) Vasily
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily
(Vasili or Vasily is a Slavic male given name of Greek origin and corresponds to Basil [qv])
(ii) The German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) surname Ziegler meant a tiler, "from Middle High German ziegel ‘roof tile’ (Old High German ziagal, from Latin [noun feminine] tegula [roof-tile]), German Ziegel. In the Middle Ages the term came to denote bricks as well as tiles, and so in some cases the term may have denoted a brickmaker or bricklayer rather than a tiler."
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.
(iii) (Modern) German - English dictionary:
Ziegel
"(noun masculine): brick;
(noun feminine): roofing tile"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ziegel