University of Helsinki

In Mannerheim's footsteps

A Finnish expedition travelled to the Chinese borderlands a hundred years after Marshal Mannerheim.

In his early career as an officer of the Imperial Russian Army, C.G.E. Mannerheim made an extensive expedition to the borderlands of China between 1906 and 1908. Mannerheim, who would later become Marshal of Finland and the Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish forces in the Second World War and, after the war, the President of Finland, covered nearly 10,000 kilometres on horseback in the course of this mission.

A hundred years later a group of Finnish scholars set out on a journey in the Marshal’s footsteps, this time in a minibus. The group also skipped the final stage of the Marshal’s journey, which took him all the way to Beijing along the Silk Road, and concentrated only on touring the westernmost province of China, the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. In ten days, the expedition covered more than 4,000 kilometres.

Juha Pentikäinen, Professor of Comparative Religion, was one of the participants on the trip. He has been on more than a hundred field trips around the world and dozens of times among the indigenous peoples in Siberia. This time, the Chinese hosts had organised and scheduled the trip on behalf of the group, so travelling was a lot easier – or was it? “Quite the contrary,” says Pentikäinen, “Now we moved quickly by bus from one place to another. Whereas we moved quickly by bus from one place to another, I actually prefer travelling in a sleigh or on a boat and living in the wild and in the midst of the people I meet, free of stress. But this is not to say that the arrangements were not excellent on this trip – they were.”

Uighur cuisine

The idea of making the trip emerged when a group of Chinese scholars came to Finland in 2000 to study the material Mannerheim gathered on his trip a hundred years ago. The Finnish and Chinese researchers agreed that the hundredth anniversary of the trip should be celebrated in some manner. “First, we organised conferences in Finland and China on Mannerheim’s expedition. Then we received an invitation to go on a specially organised journey ‘in the footsteps of Mannerheim’,” Pentikäinen says.

Pentikäinen was accompanied by Professors Juha Janhunen and Timo Vihavainen and Docent Kauko Laitinen from the University of Helsinki, Docent Alpo Juntunen from the National Defence College, Ecologist Ari Mäkelä from the Finnish Environment Institute and photographer Peter Sandberg from the Finnish-Chinese Society also joined them.

Mannerheim was no fan of Chinese food: he brought along his own cook. Today’s explorers, however, were more than happy to try the local cuisine. The Uighur kitchen found a new enthusiast in Pentikäinen. “Gastronomically, Uighur cooking is very interesting. The shashlik-type skewered meat and roast duck and deer are quite superb.”

However, an unfortunate blunder occurred during one dinner, due to something going wrong in the interpretation from English to Chinese. “We gave a thank-you speech in English but it was translated into quite the opposite. According to the interpreter, we denigrated Uighur food like Berlusconi scandalously did to Finnish cuisine. Happily, some in our group spoke Chinese and sorted out the misunderstanding.”

Studying borderland peoples

Scientifically, the cooperation initiated during the trip as well as wishes for joint fieldwork expressed by the Chinese colleagues raised Pentikäinen’s hopes of being able to study certain Manchu-Tungusic peoples in the Chinese borderlands, ones that Pentikäinen had earlier studied in Russia but who also live in China.

“Previously, nobody outside China has been allowed to study these peoples, but now China has opened up in this respect and welcomes scholars interested in them,” Pentikäinen says. “In fact, ethnographic research is currently more difficult in Russia than in China, partly because of corruption. Now would be a perfect time to study, for example, the impact of the border on the shamanistic Nanai and Tuvan cultures.”

Through Asia on horseback

The real reason for Mannerheim’s Asian expedition was strategic. Russia was looking to expand its power in Eurasia and Mannerheim was sent in his capacity as an officer of the Imperial Russian Army on a two-year journey to collect information on the roads and military forces near the Chinese border. He travelled under the guise of being a Finnish ethnographic researcher.

“Before setting out, Mannerheim consulted various researchers of the National Museum for instructions on collecting material, but luckily never received any. The methods of the day would have meant craniometry and the like,” says Pentikäinen. Without too much advice, Mannerheim did good work. Pentikäinen thinks he had the “eye of an ethnographer” evident in Mannerheim’s travelogue and in the photographs he took. “He was admirably meticulous and his accounts are very thorough.”

Mannerheim wrote a lot and also dated his entries. He described the people and languages he encountered, the monasteries he saw and the food he ate. Mannerheim used his camera to document anything of interest: he is, for example, the first Finn ever to have photographed rock paintings, which he did while riding through a mountain pass. Thanks to these accomplishments, Pentikäinen thinks Mannerheim should really be acknowledged as one of the foremost ethnographers in Finland.

Tapio Ollikainen

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