Magic mediums and their messages

The Ergun River plays a crucial role in Chi Zijian's novel Right Bank of the Ergun. A tributary of the Amur River, it was established as the Sino-Russian border by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The folk tales recounted by the characters tell how they were long ago driven from their ancestral homeland on the left bank by the Russian army, and are now "exiled" to the right bank.

The people of the Ewenki ethnic group in Right Bank of the Ergun engage in reindeer husbandry, unlike the people on the left bank, who typically raise horses. Ordinarily, they don't eat their reindeer, valuing them instead for their milk and hides, and for transport as they move camp for better hunting and, of course, more abundant "reindeer moss" (lichen).

The Ewenki practice what anthropologists call "birch-bark culture": making baskets, utensils and even canoes out of the tree bark, reserving deerskin for boots, clothes and bedding.