SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to a review forum dedicated to Mark Gamsa’s book Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Along with other forum participants, Sergey Glebov comments on various aspects of this double biography of the city and one of its inhabitants: Roger von Budberg, a Russian medical doctor of Baltic German descent, who embraced much of Chinese culture or at least the Chinese way of life.