A black-dragon border river between Russia and China
The Amur, called the Heilong or Black Dragon River in Chinese, divides the Russian Far East from Northeast China along much of its 2,824 kilometres. Counting the Argun, it runs 4,444 kilometres to the Sea of Okhotsk, and it shelters the kaluga, a sturgeon that can grow to 5.6 metres.
The river begins 303 metres above sea level where the Shilka and the Argun meet in the hills of western Northeast China. It heads east and then bends southeast in an arc of about 400 kilometres, collects the Bureya, and later its biggest tributary, the Songhua, at Tongjiang. At Khabarovsk it takes in the Ussuri and stops marking the border, spreading into braided channels before emptying through the Strait of Tartary opposite Sakhalin. In wet years, overflow from Hulun Lake links it to the Kherlen, forming a system 5,052 kilometres long.
Nobody knows for certain where the name comes from. It may be the Evenki amur or the Even amar, both meaning river, though Russian could have lent the word rather than borrowed it; another theory points to Dagur mur, big river. Old Chinese names included Yushui, Wanshui and Heishui, black water, the root of modern Heilongjiang. Even Sakhalin's name traces back through a Tungusic form to the Manchu sahaliyan, black, as in the Manchu name for the river.
Tungusic peoples such as the Evenki, Nanai and Ulch, the Mongolic Daur, some Ainu, and the Nivkhs near the mouth lived largely by fishing it. Yuan and later Ming forces reached the lower river; the eunuch Yishiha led expeditions to Tyr between 1411 and the early 1430s. Cossacks under Poyarkov and Khabarov arrived in the 1640s, and the Qing later drove them from Albazin. Russia gained everything north of the river through the Treaty of Aigun in 1858, and land east of the Ussuri through the Convention of Peking in 1860.
At least 123 fish species inhabit the basin, several found nowhere else, among them the endemic kaluga and Amur sturgeon; the Amur leopard and Amur tiger also live in the region. The first permanent bridge, at Khabarovsk, opened in 1916 so Trans-Siberian trains no longer needed ferries or tracks laid on the ice. Cross-border links have since multiplied: the Blagoveshchensk–Heihe bridge carried freight from June 2022 and passenger cars from 2 January 2025.
Source: Amur
