Word: amur
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...following the movements of a complex underground network of hunters, smugglers, black marketeers, thugs and fishermen. While she never bought any animals, she found it necessary to hand out small bribes of $20, called red envelopes, just to meet the people with the wares, which included the nearly extinct Amur leopard as well as gibbons, golden monkeys and even eagles. TIME's Tad Stoner was permitted, on an exclusive basis, to accompany her during one week of her startling sojourn...
This new crusade began with the seizure of the east bank of the Amur valley as far south as Vladivostok, which a now enfeebled China ceded in 1860. On the enormous Pacific island of Sakhalin, the Russians first established a joint "condominium" with the Japanese in 1855, then took over the whole place in 1875. In the rugged and thinly settled borderlands of Central Asia, the Russians simply invaded. They stormed legendary Tashkent in 1864 and turned the whole of Turkistan into a Russian province. They besieged the sacred city of Samarkand, site of the tomb of the medieval chieftain...
...Ilin, confirms that view. "We have reduced our strength in this region and ceased all training maneuvers on the border," he says. Ilin is the No. 2 political officer, or commissar, attached to the Far Eastern military district, which has its headquarters near Khabarovsk, on the banks of the Amur River, another stretch of contested border...
...Amur, at Blagoveshchensk, officials are negotiating a deal under which Soviet hydroelectric power will be exchanged for Chinese goods and produce. In April 76 Chinese peasants, accompanied by interpreters, crossed the border at Suifenhe to spend six months demonstrating to Siberian farmers their techniques for planting, growing and harvesting. The Chinese were greeted with a brass band and welcoming banners when they arrived in Pogranichny. The Inner Mongolian town of Manzhouli is talking about a similar arrangement with Zabaikalsk, just over the strip of border that is still patrolled by Soviet guard dogs and marked by watchtowers and electrified fences...
...result is a continuous and inefficient scramble for scarce resources, as planners lurch uncertainly from one high-priority project to the next. One such enterprise is the 2,000-mile-long Baikal-Amur Mainline railway across Siberia. This has become an engineer's nightmare, as any study would have shown. Huge stretches freeze solid in the winter and then become quagmires during summer...