Every winter, workers on the frozen Songhua River at Harbin cut the ice into heavy blocks. Within weeks those blocks become lit castles, towers and slides in what the city calls the world’s largest ice and snow theme park. For three months a year Harbin is China’s Ice City. The rest of the time it is a provincial capital of about ten million people with an unusual past. It was founded in 1898 as the hub of Russia’s Chinese Eastern Railway, briefly became the largest Russian city outside Russia, and grew into a Russian and Jewish émigré city. It then fought the plague of 1910–11 under Wu Lien-teh, endured Japanese occupation, Manchukuo and Unit 731, and went through Soviet handover before becoming an industrial centre. The ice came later, as the city turned its brutal Siberian winters into ice lanterns, a festival, Ice and Snow World and the ‘southern little potatoes’ boom of 2023–24.
This post follows the story from railway to festival: why Harbin is so cold, how the ice is built, and why a city that went viral in 2023–24 still faces some of China’s hardest economic problems.
Before the railway
The land around Harbin has an older history than the city. The Jurchen Wanyan clan rose in the valleys south-east of it. In 1115 their leader Aguda founded the Jin dynasty with his capital, Shangjing Huining, in what is now Acheng District, today formally part of Harbin. That story, and the later rise of the Manchus, is told in our post on the Jurchens and Manchus. Even the city’s name is disputed. The city government favours a Jurchen word meaning “swan”; other scholars propose Manchu or Mongolian roots meaning a place for drying fishing nets or a riverside village. No explanation has won general agreement.
The founding date is also contested. Local historians have proposed 1097, 1115, 1761 and 1905, each tied to a different place name or office. Most city historians, however, date modern Harbin to 1898 and the Chinese Eastern Railway. Before then the south bank of the Songhua held a scatter of villages with a few thousand people.
A city made by the Chinese Eastern Railway
Harbin exists because of Russian imperial geography. The Trans-Siberian Railway had to loop far north along the Amur to reach Vladivostok, and a line straight across Manchuria would be much shorter. After Japan defeated China in 1895, Russia helped force Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula, then collected its reward. A secret treaty of June 1896, negotiated by Li Hongzhang with Sergei Witte, and a contract that September let a nominally joint company, controlled in practice by Russia, build and run the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria. In 1898 Russia also leased Port Arthur and Dalian and added a southern branch to them. These gains fit the wider pattern of Qing losses described in our post on the century of humiliation.
Harbin lay where the main line crossed the Songhua and the southern branch left it. On 9 June 1898 the railway’s construction bureau moved there, the date many historians treat as the city’s birth. The company governed a “railway zone” with its own police, courts and schools. Pristan (now Daoli), by the wharves, became the commercial quarter, and New Town (Nangang), on higher ground, held the station, offices and grand residences. Fujiadian (now Daowai), outside the zone, became the Chinese town of migrants from Shandong and Hebei. The line opened throughout in 1903. Harbin was Russia’s rear base in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, after which Japan took the southern branch and Harbin stayed the hub of the Russian-run north.
The Russian city was built quickly and on a large scale. The railway census of 1913 counted 68,549 residents of 53 nationalities. About half were Russian subjects, and there were substantial Chinese, Jewish, Polish, Japanese, German, Tatar, Georgian and Baltic communities. Only about one in nine residents had been born in Harbin. The Harbin brewery, usually dated to 1900 and founded by a Polish entrepreneur, is often described as China’s oldest.
Central Street and St Sophia
The Russian city survives most visibly in Pristan. Central Street (Zhongyang Dajie), laid out in 1898 as Kitayskaya (“Chinese”) Street, runs about 1.45 kilometres from the river towards the station district. It was paved with granite setts in 1925, and by the 1920s it held more than a hundred shops, hotels and banks in eclectic, Baroque, Renaissance and Art Nouveau styles, including the Modern Hotel of 1906, which is still open. Protected since 1986, it is now a pedestrian street and the city’s busiest tourist route.
Harbin’s best-known building stands a few streets away. The Cathedral of St Sophia began in 1907 as a timber church for a Russian army division. The present red-brick building was begun in September 1923 and completed in November 1932. It is a Russian-Byzantine church on a cross-shaped plan, 53.35 metres high, crowned by a huge green onion dome on a tall drum, with smaller tented towers and a belfry around it. Closed after the 1950s, it survived the Cultural Revolution as a warehouse hidden behind apartment blocks. It was listed as a national heritage site in 1996, restored with local donations, cleared of surrounding buildings and reopened in 1997 as the Harbin Architecture and Art Gallery. It holds no services. Harbin lost many other churches: Red Guards destroyed the wooden St Nicholas Cathedral, which stood on a central square, in August 1966.
Jews, White Russians and other émigrés
For Russian Jews, Harbin offered escape from the Pale of Settlement and the pogroms. A community was formally organised in 1903, and it built the Main Synagogue in 1909 and the New Synagogue in 1921, along with schools, a hospital, newspapers and Zionist youth groups. Estimates of its peak in the 1920s range from about 13,000 to 25,000; Chinese researchers tend to give the higher figures. Dr Abraham Kaufman led the community until 1945. The grandfather of the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is buried in the Huangshan Jewish cemetery, where about 600 graves were relocated. The New Synagogue has been a museum of Harbin’s Jewish history since 2004. Many Harbin Jews later moved to Shanghai, whose Jewish story is told in our Old Shanghai post.
The revolution of 1917 changed Harbin again. A Bolshevik-led Harbin Soviet tried to seize the railway in December 1917 and was disarmed by Chinese troops and loyalists of the railway’s Russian manager. After the Whites’ defeat in Siberia, soldiers and civilian refugees poured in. Sources speak of more than 100,000 arrivals around 1920, and the Russian population in the early 1920s is often put at over 100,000, although counts varied widely and were never precise. For a time Harbin was the largest Russian community outside Soviet Russia, and unlike émigrés in Paris or Prague, its residents lived in an almost entirely Russian city. It had Russian schools, newspapers, opera companies, and a railway engineering school founded in 1920 that became the Harbin Institute of Technology. When China and the Soviet Union agreed in 1924 to run the railway jointly, employees had to be Chinese or Soviet citizens, and many émigrés had to take Soviet passports or lose their jobs. In 1929 a short Soviet military campaign reversed an attempt by the warlord Zhang Xueliang to seize the railway outright.
The plague winter of 1910–11
Harbin’s most influential moment in world history may have been medical. In the autumn of 1910 pneumonic plague broke out along the railway, carried by marmot trappers from the Manzhouli border area, and spread through the crowded lodging houses of Fujiadian. Pneumonic plague passes from person to person through the air and was almost always fatal. The Qing government sent Wu Lien-teh (Wu Liande), a 31-year-old Penang-born doctor trained at Cambridge, then vice-director of the army medical college in Tianjin. He reached Harbin on 24 December 1910 and three days later carried out what is usually described as the first recorded autopsy in modern Chinese medicine, which confirmed plague.
Wu concluded that the disease was airborne and pushed for measures that now sound familiar: quarantine, isolation wards, closure of lodging houses, travel restrictions, and cotton-and-gauze masks for staff and, where possible, the public. A French doctor, Gérald Mesny, who disputed the need for masks, died of plague shortly after visiting patients without one. With the ground frozen and more than 2,000 corpses unburied, Wu obtained an imperial edict for mass cremation, a radical step in a culture of ancestor veneration. Burning began on 31 January 1911, and the epidemic faded by spring. In April 1911 Wu chaired the International Plague Conference at Mukden (Shenyang). The death toll for the whole outbreak is usually given as about 60,000, although some estimates are lower. Wu went on to found China’s plague-prevention service and a medical school that became Harbin Medical University, where his statue stands. An earlier epidemic appears in our post on plague and the fall of the Yuan.
Manchukuo and Unit 731
Japanese troops occupied Harbin in February 1932, and the city became part of Manchukuo, the puppet state nominally ruled by Puyi. In March 1935 the Soviet Union sold its railway share to Manchukuo for 140 million yen. Many Soviet citizens went home, where from 1937 the NKVD’s “Harbin operation” treated returnees as presumed Japanese spies. Memorial society figures put those arrested at more than 48,000 and those shot at nearly 31,000; other archival counts are lower. In Harbin, the Japanese sponsored the Russian Fascist Party, whose gangs preyed on Jews and others. The 1933 kidnapping and murder of the pianist Simon Kaspé, son of the Modern Hotel’s owner, became notorious, and many Jews left for Shanghai, Tianjin and Palestine.
Harbin is also linked to one of the worst crimes of the war. At Pingfang, then about 24 kilometres south of the city and now one of its districts, the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 under Shirō Ishii built a large complex from the mid-1930s, disguised as an epidemic-prevention and water-purification department. There it carried out lethal human experiments on prisoners, mainly Chinese but also Russians, Koreans and others, and developed biological weapons later used against Chinese cities and villages. The death toll at Pingfang is uncertain. Chinese official accounts say at least 3,000 people died there between 1939 and 1945, drawing partly on testimony at the Soviet Khabarovsk trials of 1949; other estimates are higher. The unit destroyed much of the site in 1945. Twelve members were convicted at Khabarovsk, while Ishii and others received immunity from the United States in exchange for their data. A new exhibition hall at the ruins opened on 15 August 2015. The occupation’s place in Chinese memory is discussed in our post on China’s fear of chaos.
Soviet handover and the industrial city
The Soviet army entered Harbin on 20 August 1945. Nationalist troops never reached it, and on 28 April 1946 Communist forces took over as the Soviets withdrew, making Harbin one of the first large cities under Communist rule and a rear base for the civil war in Manchuria (see our review of Red Dawn Over China). The railway, jointly run as the Chinese Changchun Railway, was handed over completely at a ceremony in Harbin on 31 December 1952. Most remaining Russians and other Europeans left in the 1950s and early 1960s, some deported and others emigrating to Australia, Israel and the Americas. The Jewish community’s institutions closed in 1963.
Under the First Five-Year Plan Harbin became a heavy-industry base. Thirteen of the 156 Soviet-aided key projects were built there, among them the plants that grew into Harbin Electric, one of China’s big three makers of power-generation equipment (see our nuclear post), and the Harbin aircraft works. After the Sino-Soviet split, the city’s position close to the Soviet border made it vulnerable. Some factories and institutions moved inland; the Harbin Institute of Technology spent 1969–73 in Chongqing. The wider northern industrial story appears in our Baowu post. From the late 1990s restructuring of state enterprises brought mass lay-offs (xiagang), which hit Harbin and the rest of the Northeast hard.
Why Harbin is so cold
Harbin lies at about 45.75°N, roughly the latitude of Venice or Bordeaux, yet its winters are far colder than theirs. The reason is the Siberian High. Each winter a vast, shallow dome of very cold, dense air builds over Mongolia and Siberia, and dry north-westerly winds flow out from it across north-east China as the winter monsoon. Harbin is far from any moderating sea and open to those continental winds, so its climate is humid continental with dry, sunny, bitterly cold winters and warm, wet summers.
Figures differ a little by period and station. The China Meteorological Administration’s 1991–2020 normals for Harbin give a January mean of −17.3 °C, an average January high of about −12 °C and an average January low of about −22 °C, with only about 4 mm of precipitation in the month. Some other datasets and reference periods give a January mean a degree or so colder. The recorded minimum at the city station is −42.6 °C, while July averages about 24 °C. Five months average below freezing, and the Songhua stays frozen for roughly four months. That long, dry, reliable cold is the raw material for everything that follows.
From ice lanterns to a festival
The ice-lantern tradition began with the simplest possible technique. In the Northeast, people froze water in buckets, poured out the unfrozen centre and set a candle inside the resulting shell of ice to make a windproof lamp. In the hungry winter of 1963 the city’s party leader Ren Zhongyi had the parks department stage an ice-lantern garden party. It opened in Zhaolin Park on 7 February 1963, the Lantern Festival that year, with bucket-moulded lamps lit by candles and a crude elephant of packed snow. From the second year sculptors carved natural river ice and used electric light. Interrupted in the Cultural Revolution, the Zhaolin Park show still runs each winter.
On 5 January 1985 the first Harbin Ice and Snow Festival opened outside Zhaolin Park. It bundled the lantern show with skating, winter swimming and sculpture competitions, and provincial tourism sources say it drew more than two million visits in its first month. Now the China Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival, it opens each 5 January and is usually ranked alongside Sapporo’s snow festival and the Quebec Winter Carnival, with a Sun Island expo devoted to giant snow sculpture.
The biggest attraction came with the millennium. Harbin Ice and Snow World opened on 31 December 1999 on the Songhua’s north bank. Its first edition covered about 200,000 square metres and used 60,000 cubic metres of ice. It has been rebuilt every winter since, and it has grown enormously. The 25th edition in 2023–24 covered 816,600 square metres and used about 250,000 cubic metres of ice and snow for more than 1,000 structures, including a 43-metre central tower. Guinness World Records named it the world’s largest ice and snow theme park.
How the ice is harvested and built
Most of the ice still comes from the Songhua. Harvesting begins once the river ice is about 30 centimetres thick, usually in December, and now opens with a ceremonial “ice-harvesting festival”. Workers mark lines, cut deep grooves with power saws, crack strips loose with long ice chisels, break them into blocks and haul them onto the bank for trucking. Typical blocks are about 1.6 metres long, 0.8 metres wide and up to half a metre thick, weighing roughly 350 kilograms. Ice and Snow World now also stores ice through the summer under insulation, 100,000 cubic metres of it in 2023–24, so that building can start before the river freezes.
The large buildings are constructed much like masonry. Designers draw them up in advance, and crews lay the blocks in staggered courses so that the joints do not line up, trim them with chainsaws and cut channels for LED lighting. Instead of mortar they use water. Water poured into the joints freezes quickly in the deep cold, bonding the blocks into a single mass. Sculptors then carve detail with chisels, picks and hand saws. For the crystal-clear pieces seen in competitions, some ice is made from purified water, because natural river ice is slightly cloudy. Snow sculptures are carved from large blocks of compacted snow. A big site needs thousands of workers for several weeks, and it all melts or is broken up in spring.
The 2023–24 boom
Harbin had long been a domestic winter destination, but in 2023–24 it went viral. Social media filled with stories of the city pampering visitors from the south, nicknamed “southern little potatoes” (nanfang xiao tudou) because they looked small, bundled up in padded coats beside the tall northerners. Restaurants served frozen pears sliced into dainty portions, airport cabin crew danced to greet arrivals, Oroqen herders brought reindeer into the streets, and netizens nicknamed the city “Erbin”.
The numbers were real, although official visitor counts deserve caution. The city tourism bureau reported 3.05 million visits and 5.91 billion yuan of tourism revenue over the three-day New Year holiday of 2024, both records, and Ice and Snow World received 2.71 million visitors in its 61-day season. Chinese media put the whole 2023–24 season at about 87 million visits and 125 billion yuan. These figures come from mobile-phone and big-data estimates that include many local trips, so they cannot be compared with international arrival statistics. The bureau then reported 90.36 million visits and 137.2 billion yuan of spending for 2024–25, up 9.7% and 16.6%. Ice and Snow World drew more than 3.56 million visitors that season and 3.06 million in 2025–26.
The 2025 Asian Winter Games
The boom fed into, and was fed by, a sporting event. Harbin had already hosted the Asian Winter Games in 1996 and the Winter Universiade in 2009. In July 2023 the Olympic Council of Asia confirmed it as host of the ninth Asian Winter Games. They were held from 7 to 14 February 2025, with about 1,200 athletes from 34 national Olympic committees competing in 64 events. Ice events were held in Harbin and skiing at the Yabuli resort. Xi Jinping opened the Games, and China topped the medal table with 32 golds and 85 medals in all, ahead of South Korea and Japan. The city used the Games to upgrade its ski runs and rinks.
The cold economics
Tourism has not solved Harbin’s deeper problems. The Northeast, once China’s industrial heartland, has been losing people for years. Heilongjiang’s population fell from about 38.3 million in 2010 to 31.9 million in 2020, the steepest proportional fall of any province, and to 30.29 million by the end of 2024. Harbin’s 2020 census count of 10.0 million was 5.6% lower than in 2010. Young people leave for the south, fertility is among China’s lowest and the population is ageing fast. Harbin’s 2024 GDP of about 602 billion yuan, up 4.3%, is modest for a city of its size.
Winter tourism is also seasonal and depends on the weather. Officials want a year-round “ice and snow economy”, with indoor snow parks, cool summer holidays, trade with Russia, and the city’s universities and equipment makers. Whether one viral winter can change the trajectory of a region that has been losing people and industry for three decades is an open question. What the boom did show is that the things that once made Harbin seem remote are now its best assets: the cold, the Russian streets and the frozen river.
Harbin began as a Russian railway town on Chinese soil, became a refuge, a battlefield, a crime scene and a factory city, and turned its harshest feature into a spectacle. Each spring the ice castles melt back into the Songhua, and each December the saws go back onto the river.
