哈尔滨：把冬天做成产品

The most interesting thing about Harbin is its attitude to winter.

Most cities treat winter as a season to be got through.

Harbin turned winter into a product.

In January, daytime temperatures in Harbin are often around minus twenty.

You have to wear a hat and gloves to go out, and after five minutes your face starts to hurt.

Under conditions like that, a city has two options.

One is to keep people indoors as much as possible and wait for spring.

The other is to turn winter itself into a usable resource.

Harbin chose the second.

The material basis for that choice is the Songhua River.

The Songhua runs through the city, freezes solid in winter, and the ice can reach about a metre thick.

You can walk on the surface, and in some places drive on it.

There are people cycling on the river, and visitors who came specifically to see the ice.

The key step is harvesting the ice.

Every winter, workers use machines on the river to cut the ice into neat large blocks.

A single block is about as tall as an adult.

Trucks carry the blocks into the city to build the Ice and Snow World.

So those ice buildings aren't material brought in from somewhere else.

They are what this river looks like in winter.

Going to the Ice and Snow World at night, the first impression is colour.

Lights are buried inside the huge ice walls and ice towers.

When the lights come on, the whole block of ice begins to glow.

Blue, red and green move around inside the ice.

Many people assume this is coloured ice.

In fact it's transparent ice plus coloured light.

The technique isn't new.

It comes from the ice lanterns fishermen used to make: freeze water into a hollow shell, put a candle inside, and the wind can't blow it out.

In 1963, Harbin held its first ice lantern fair.

A windproof lighting device eventually became an exhibition at the scale of a whole city.

When spring arrives, all these buildings melt away.

The water returns to the Songhua, and the next year it's harvested again.

I asked a member of staff whether this was wasteful.

His answer stayed with me.

He said: we didn't buy the ice, the river lent it to us.

When we're done we give it back, and next year we can borrow it again.

It sounds simple, but it describes an unusual relationship with a resource.

The next day I went to Central Street.

The architecture on this street is unlike most Chinese cities.

Many of the buildings date from over a hundred years ago, in styles from Russia and Europe.

The reason is the railway.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Chinese Eastern Railway was built, Harbin went from a fishing village to a railway hub very quickly.

Large numbers of Russians and people from elsewhere in Europe came here to work.

The streets, the buildings and the food all carry traces of that period.

At lunch I ate northeastern food.

The plates were absurdly large, the portions generous, with plenty of oil and salt.

In a city where it's minus twenty outdoors, that kind of eating has a clear function.

In the afternoon I went back to the river.

The sun went down, the ice turned from white to pale blue, and the lights of the Ice and Snow World began to come on in the distance.

I thought about what the staff member had said.

A city took its own hardest condition and made it into something people will travel specifically to see.

If the place you live has a season everyone complains about, could it become that place's defining feature?