Finnish horseback adventurers arrested on their way to Tiananmen Square

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Within sight of the finish line to their ride across China, Kristian Nyman, 63, and Tony Ilmoni, 55, were arrested in Beijing on Saturday morning.
      The men were following in the footsteps of Carl Gustav Mannerheim, Finland’s war-time Commander-in-Chief and President from 1944 to 1946, who made a journey to China on horseback in 1906 to 1908, mapping the area for Russian military purposes. At the time, more than a decade before Finnish independence, Mannerheim was an officer in the Russian Imperial Army.
     
Nyman and Ilmoni were seized and taken into custody when they were riding towards Tiananmen Square, which is China’s political heart and the site of a number of political events. Today the square is primarily known for the violent suppression of student protests that took place there in 1989.
      Kristian Nyman and Tony Ilmoni started their journey from Kyrgyzstan last autumn. After a winter break, they continued the trip in Western China in March.
     
The ride to Tiananmen Square was to be the culmination of the trip on Saturday, but just before they reached the square, a dozen police officers took them for interrogations to the police station located inside the Forbidden City.
      Nyman and Ilmoni were informed that as they did not have appropriate permits they would be deported immediately.
     
However, the Finnish Embassy managed to intervene in the process, and the men were allowed to return to their hotel on Saturday evening local time.
      The adventurers were not deported after all, and they could stay in Beijing and have a few days’ holiday in the city, as they had initially planned.
      "We had a permit to ride into Beijing, and there was no mention whatsoever of the Tiananmen Square being excluded", said Ilmoni.
     
The pair's modern trip across China was hardly as dangerous for the Chinese authorities as that a century ago: Mannerheim was acting quite as much as a reconnaisance officer and a spy as he was taking part in a French-led scientific expedition.
      Aside from valuable data on possible routes for Russian troops, Mannerheim's two-year trip also spawned a great deal of ethnological and archaeological information and a priceless collection of photographs and artefacts.


Links:
  Mannerheim´s Way
  Tiananmen Square (Wikipedia)
  Mannerheim in Asia

Helsingin Sanomat