Harbin

Harbin was a few fishing and farming villages on the Songhua until 1898, when Russian engineers chose the spot as the junction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, the short cut carrying the Trans-Siberian across Manchuria to Vladivostok, with a branch running south to Dalian. A company town went up at speed, laid out in European blocks with Orthodox churches, and filled with Russian railway staff and with Chinese labourers and merchants from Shandong and Hebei.

Revolution made it a refuge. After 1917 tens of thousands of White Russians fled here, and for a time Harbin held one of the largest Russian communities outside Russia, with newspapers, schools, an opera and a conservatory. A Jewish community of several thousand, drawn from the Russian Empire, built synagogues, a hospital and businesses in Daoli. Japan took the city in 1932 and ran it within Manchukuo; at Pingfang on the southern outskirts the army's Unit 731 carried out biological warfare experiments on prisoners, one of the worst episodes of the occupation. The Russian population dwindled through the 1930s and 1940s, and most of the Jewish community left after the Second World War.

Soviet troops entered in 1945, the Communists took the city early in the civil war, and under the People's Republic Harbin became a centre of heavy industry, power equipment and engineering, with Soviet advisers in the 1950s. The Sino-Soviet split closed the border and turned a cosmopolitan city inward. Ice lanterns, a folk custom, were organised into a public display from 1963, and the winter festival that grew from it, together with the restoration of the old quarters and a new cross-border trade with Russia, has reshaped modern Harbin.

Harbin advertises itself as the most European of Chinese cities, and the claim rests on brick and habit: onion domes and art nouveau facades, bread and sausage in ordinary shops, kvass sold from barrels, and a taste for classical music that goes back to the Russian conservatory and continues in the summer concert season and a music school tradition. The city was named a UNESCO City of Music in 2010.

Winter is the other half of the identity. Ice is a material here rather than a nuisance: blocks are sawn from the Songhua and built into palaces lit from within, snow is carved on Sun Island, and residents walk, sledge and even swim in the frozen river. Outdoor ice cream in January, frozen pears thawed in water before eating, and children's ice slides in public parks all belong to the same habit of making use of the cold rather than hiding from it.

In manner Harbin is thoroughly Dongbei — direct, loud, hospitable and funny, with the regional accent that carries much of Chinese television comedy, and errenzhuan song-and-dance routines on local stages. Banquets involve toasting, and refusing every glass needs a clear reason. The Manchu past is present in place names and museums more than in daily life, and the Russian inheritance is now a matter of architecture, food and civic pride rather than a living community.

The 2020 census counted just over ten million people in the vast municipality of Harbin, which includes farmland and counties well beyond the city; the built-up area held about five million of them, a figure that fell over the previous decade. Most residents live in blocks of flats heated from a district system that is switched on in October and off in April, and the annual change of heating dates is a genuine civic event.

The economy grew on machinery, power equipment, aircraft and food processing, and those factories still matter alongside the province's enormous farms — Heilongjiang is one of China's leading grain provinces, and Harbin is its market, processing centre and transport hub. Tourism has become a major earner, concentrated into the winter weeks, with hotels, ice sculptors, drivers and sellers of fur hats all working to that calendar. Universities, hospitals and provincial administration employ a large share of the middle class.

Like much of the Northeast, Harbin faces an ageing and shrinking population as younger people move south for work, and it has been affected by the long decline of state industry. Daily rhythms follow the seasons sharply: winter life is indoors, in heated flats, malls, hotpot restaurants and karaoke rooms, while the short summer brings the whole city outside to the riverbank, night markets and beer stalls until late.

Dongbei cooking is at its fullest here: big plates meant for sharing, strong flavours and a lot of pork. Guobaorou, slices of pork fried in batter and coated in a sweet-and-sour glaze, was created in Harbin in the late Qing period and is the local dish visitors are told to try first. Stews of pork with potato and glass noodles, suancai — fermented Chinese cabbage — served with white pork and blood sausage, di san xian of potato, aubergine and pepper, and jiaozi dumplings by the plateful fill out most menus.

The Russian inheritance is the city's oddity. Dalieba, a large round sourdough loaf baked in the Russian manner, is sold in bakeries on Central Street alongside hongchang, the smoked red sausage that Harbin makes in quantity, and lieba bread crumbs are eaten with soup. Kvass, the mildly fermented bread drink, is drunk by the bottle, and borscht appears on Chinese menus as luosong tang. Ice cream on a stick is eaten outdoors in deep winter as a local ritual, and frozen pears and persimmons are sold from open-air stalls.

Drink is taken seriously. Harbin Beer, founded in the city in 1900, is among the oldest breweries in China, and beer accompanies the charcoal skewers of the summer barbecue streets. Baijiu is poured at banquets with rounds of toasts, and tea and sunflower seeds fill the gaps between meals.