Manzhouli

Manzhouli owes its existence to a railway. When Russia built the Chinese Eastern Railway across the Manchurian plain from 1898, the line entered China here, and the station opened at the start of the twentieth century was called Manchuria Station — a name the Chinese rendered as Manzhouli. Coal was found close by at Jalainur and mined from 1902 to fuel the locomotives, and a raw settlement of railwaymen, miners, traders and soldiers, Russian and Chinese together, grew on the treeless steppe.

The frontier made the town's fortunes and repeatedly broke them. It was fought over during the Russian Civil War period, absorbed into the Japanese-backed state of Manchukuo in the 1930s, and taken by Soviet forces in 1945. Trade flourished in the 1950s while Beijing and Moscow were allies, then all but stopped during the Sino-Soviet split, when the border was militarised and the town became a garrison at the end of the line.

Reopening changed everything again. From the late 1980s cross-border trade resumed, and in 1992 Manzhouli was designated an open border city, which brought customs yards, warehouses and a rush of shuttle traders carrying goods in both directions. It became China's busiest land port of entry, handling a large share of the country's overland trade with Russia and eastern Europe, and cross-border traffic grew further after 2022 as trade between the two countries increased. With the money came a decision to sell the town's history as spectacle: from the 1990s public buildings, hotels and whole streets were rebuilt in an elaborate Russian style, and the matryoshka doll became the municipal emblem.

Few Chinese towns wear three cultures so openly. Street signs carry Chinese characters, the vertical Mongolian script used across Inner Mongolia and Cyrillic Russian, and shopkeepers in the centre deal in Mandarin and Russian through the day. The architecture is a deliberate performance — onion domes, turrets, painted plaster and oversized nesting dolls — built recently and without apology, and locals treat it as a business asset as much as a style.

The surrounding countryside belongs to the Hulunbuir grasslands and the Barga Mongol herding tradition, and Mongol culture supplies the region's summer calendar: the naadam games of wrestling, horse racing and archery, the morin khuur horse-head fiddle, long song, and cairns of stones called oboo standing on rises above the pasture. Milk tea, mutton and a blue scarf offered to guests are the language of hospitality out on the steppe.

Winter shapes everything else. Ice sculpture, heated interiors, fur hats and heavy coats are the ordinary furniture of half the year, and the social life of the cold months moves indoors to hotpot restaurants and karaoke rooms. Drinking at dinner is taken seriously, in the Northeastern manner and with a Russian accent, and toasts are expected. The border itself is treated with care: the crossing, its guards and its installations are working state facilities and not a backdrop for photographs.

Manzhouli is small by Chinese standards: the 2010 census counted almost 250,000 people across its municipal area of some 700 square kilometres, which takes in the separate mining district of Jalainur. It is a sub-prefectural city under the Hulunbuir prefecture-level city in Inner Mongolia, and the prefecture seat, Hailar, lies a few hours east by road.

Trade with Russia is the economy. Customs, freight forwarding, warehousing, currency exchange, fur and leather shops and wholesale markets employ much of the town, and the rhythm of lorry queues and container trains at the port of entry is the local weather report as much as the temperature. Coal mining at Jalainur, timber handling, grain and a steady tourist trade from other Chinese provinces fill out the rest. Cross-border business is exposed to politics and exchange rates, and the town has gone through several booms and slumps as a result.

Daily life is arranged around the cold. Flats and offices are centrally heated from autumn to spring, children walk to school in temperatures far below freezing, and food is bought and stored in bulk. In the brief summer the squares fill in the evening, families drive out to the grassland at weekends, and the town's population swells with domestic visitors. Younger residents leave for larger cities in Heilongjiang and beyond, a pattern shared with much of the Northeast.

Three kitchens meet here. From the grassland come the Mongol staples: shouba rou, chunks of boiled mutton eaten off the bone with a knife, whole roast lamb at banquets, mutton hotpot in winter, and suutei tsai, salted milk tea, sometimes thickened with millet or butter. Dried curd cheeses and milk skin are sold as snacks, and mutton skewers grilled over charcoal are the standard summer street food.

From the Northeast come the stews and dumplings of Dongbei cooking — pork and potato simmered together, pork belly with potato-starch glass noodles, fermented cabbage called suancai eaten with white pork, and jiaozi dumplings in quantity. Portions are famously large and dishes are shared. Harbin beer and baijiu are the usual accompaniments.

From across the border comes the Russian layer, unusually deep for a Chinese town. Borscht appears on menus as luosong tang, along with sausage, dense round dalieba bread, pancakes and pickles, and shops near the crossing sell Russian chocolate, biscuits, honey, condensed milk and vodka to Chinese visitors while Russian shoppers carry Chinese goods the other way. Kvass, the mildly fermented bread drink common in Harbin, is easy to find, and ice cream is eaten outdoors in the cold as a matter of local pride.