哈尔滨：使用而不消耗

What makes Harbin worth studying is the way it handles winter.

Most cold cities treat the winter months as a stretch to be endured, and try to minimize their effect on daily life.

Harbin took the opposite route: it treats winter as raw material.

January daytime temperatures sit around minus twenty, and go lower at night.

You have to wear a hat and gloves to leave the house, and after five minutes your face starts to hurt.

Under conditions like these, a city has broadly two directions available.

One is to keep residents indoors as far as possible and wait for spring.

The other is to convert the cold into a resource that can be operated commercially.

Harbin chose the latter, and the material condition supporting that choice is the Songhua River.

The Songhua runs through the city, freezes completely in winter, and the ice can reach around a metre in thickness.

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

In winter the river carries cyclists, and visitors who travelled specifically to be there.

The genuinely crucial stage is the ice harvest.

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

A single block is about the height of an adult.

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

Put another way, those ice buildings are not material purchased from elsewhere.

They are simply what this river becomes in winter, temporarily relocated.

At night, the most immediate impression at the Ice and Snow World is colour.

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

When they come on, the whole block glows from within, and blue, red and green move through the ice.

Many people assume this is dyed ice; in fact it is transparent ice with coloured lighting.

The practice has a clear local origin.

Fishermen used to make ice lanterns: freeze water into a hollow shell, set a candle inside, and the wind cannot put it out.

In 1963, Harbin held its first ice lantern fair.

A windproof lighting device gradually expanded into an exhibition industry at the scale of a city.

Once spring temperatures arrive, these buildings melt entirely.

The water returns to the Songhua, and the following year it is harvested again.

I asked a member of staff whether this counted as waste.

His answer was more interesting than I'd expected.

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

We give it back when we're finished, and next year we can borrow it again.

That sentence describes a relationship with a resource that is rare in modern industry: use without consumption, borrowing without ownership.

The next day I walked down Central Street.

The architecture here is clearly unlike most Chinese cities; many of the buildings date from over a century ago, in styles drawn from Russia and across Europe.

The reason lies with the railway.

At the end of the nineteenth century, construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway turned Harbin from a fishing village into a railway hub within a very short period.

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

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

Harbin's European feel therefore comes from its actual population and industrial history.

Lunch was northeastern food.

The plates were absurdly large, the portions generous, with no shortage of oil or salt.

In a city where it is minus twenty outdoors, that structure of eating serves a clear function.

So-called local taste is, very often, written by the climate.

In the afternoon I went back to the riverside.

The sun dropped, the ice shifted from white to pale blue, and in the distance the lights of the Ice and Snow World started coming on.

I thought again about what the staff member had said.

A city put its least favourable condition on open display and made it into something outsiders will travel specifically to look at.

There is commercial calculation in that, and also a certain frankness about its own circumstances.

If the place you live has a season everyone complains about, could it be reinterpreted as that place's defining mark?