In an unexpected spin-off from my lecture last week about Mannerheim’s adventures in the Far East, I have obtained a copy of the Chinese edition of his epic Across Asia, published in 2004. “Sino-Finnish friendship,” proclaims a poetic belly-band bearing the logo of the Metso paper company, “is long-standing and well-established.”

Translator Wang Jiaji fulminates in his afterword about the pitfalls of trying to work out which godforsaken village Mannerheim might have been writing about in 1907, after 12 hours in the saddle and a rainstorm, when he got the name from an illiterate Kirghiz tribesman who couldn’t speak Chinese, seemingly unaware that even as the presses were rolling on this edition, Harry Halén was publishing his Analytical Index to Across Asia in faraway Helsinki. It’s this frightfully obscure work, for which I suspect I was the sole customer, that made it possible for me to get the names right in my own book.

“The purpose of this trip was military in nature,” says Ulla-Maja Kulonen carefully in her preface, “but it also carried other investigation tasks.” Well, yes, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Mannerheim was sent into Central Asia to map terrain, probe military readiness, and investigate the penetration of Japanese influence, assembling the data for a 1909 military report, which handed Russian top brass a game-plan for invading Xinjiang, and a terse assessment of the lack of a threat that China presented.

To do so, he travelled undercover for two years, posing as a Swedish ethnologist, and performatively shipping back artefacts and observations by the crateful during his long mission. It is a testament to Mannerheim’s enthusiastic embrace of his cover story that his findings would become the subject of several academic papers, this brick-sized diary of his journey, a large chunk of the Central Asian holdings in Helsinki museums, and 1200+ priceless photographs of life in China at the turn of the 20th century.

His diary was published by in Chinese the China Nationality Art Photograph Publishing House, suggesting that a century later, it is his observations of local ethnic communities that is an unexpected bonus . An anonymous editor provides a frowning afterword in which he is a lot pushier about the whole spy thing.

“We must… recognise that as an explorer from a Western power 100 years ago, the author’s activities in our country’s west served the dual purpose of military espionage and scientific exploration,” say The Editors ominously. “This is a concrete manifestation of the colonial policy of the Tsarist government and the history of imperialist aggression against China.” Such commentary is not that unusual – the Mandarin translator of my own Short History of the Silk Road spattered the published edition with quibbling footnotes, although he stopped short of calling me an imperialist aggressor.

Translator Wang Jiaji, himself the author of a Chinese book on Mannerheim, adds that the publication of the book in Chinese was the culmination of a massive effort by multiple Finnish organisations – including a translation subsidy from the Finnish Literature Information Centre, and big-name sponsors including a bunch of paper companies (Metso, UPM-Kymmene, Finnish Forestry Industries Federation), Nokia and Finnair. Although Across Asia was completed in 1908, it lay unpublished for three decades, which left it in an odd legal position regarding copyright – the Finno-Ugric Society waived all fees in order to get the Chinese edition off the ground.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Mannerheim: President, Soldier Spy. Nobody has called him an imperialist aggressor recently.