Amur River
The border river of the Russian Far East and Manchuria
The Amur is one of the world's great undammed rivers and for more than a thousand kilometers it traces the border between Russia and China, a frontier fought over and finally fixed along its waters. Known to the Chinese as the Heilong Jiang, the Black Dragon River, it drains the forests and steppes of northeast Asia and runs to the Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific. Its basin is a meeting place of taiga and grassland, home to Siberian tigers and the last wild cranes of the region.
The Amur proper runs about 2,824 kilometers from the confluence of the Shilka and Argun rivers — counted with the Argun headwaters it reaches some 4,444 kilometers, among the ten longest river systems on Earth. It flows east and then north, swelled by major tributaries like the Songhua and Ussuri, before turning to its mouth at Nikolayevsk on the Tatar Strait of the Sea of Okhotsk. Largely free of large dams along its main stem, it still floods naturally across broad wetlands, sustaining one of the richest temperate ecosystems in Asia.
The river was the prize of Russian eastward expansion in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its valley was the scene of a brief but dangerous border clash between the Soviet Union and China in 1969. Today it is a vital fishery, famous for its giant kaluga sturgeon and salmon runs, and a fragile refuge for endangered wildlife. Plans for dams and the pressures of farming and pollution from its booming basin make the Amur a test of whether one of the planet's great free-flowing rivers can stay that way.