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's average temperature runs between minus twenty-four and minus thirteen, and 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 reaches sixty to ninety centimetres in thickness.

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

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.

Last winter, the ice taken off the river came to roughly two hundred thousand cubic metres.

What's worth noting is that this ice is not simply used up within the season.

A considerable portion is put into storage, held at low temperature through the summer, and kept for the following winter.

This year the park put more than four hundred thousand cubic metres of ice and snow into use in total.

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 Ice and Snow World has run since 1999, and this year is the twenty-seventh edition.

But the source of the practice is considerably older.

On 7 February 1963 — the fourteenth day of the first lunar month — Harbin held China's first ice lantern fair.

That was the first organized ice lantern event in the country.

Before that, ice lanterns were an everyday tool for fishermen and farmers: freeze water into a hollow shell of ice, set a candle inside, and the shell blocks the wind so the flame cannot be put out.

A windproof lighting device expanded, sixty-odd years later, 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.

This street runs one thousand four hundred and fifty metres, twenty-one point three four metres wide, and is the longest pedestrian street in Asia.

The surface is laid with square stone blocks, which local people call bread stones.

The architecture on both sides is clearly unlike most Chinese cities, in styles drawn from Russia and across Europe.

The reason lies with the railway.

In 1898, construction began on the Chinese Eastern Railway.

In June of that year, personnel from the railway engineering bureau arrived in Harbin by boat.

Central Street began as nothing more than a dirt road for hauling railway materials.

As Russian workers, merchants and migrants from many countries poured in, that dirt road gradually became today's paved street.

In other words, this city was to a large degree brought into being by a railway.

Its European feel comes from its actual population and industrial history, not from decoration added later.

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 twenty-something below outdoors, that structure of eating serves a clear function.

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 came on one after another.

I thought again about what the staff member had said.

One candle, sixty-odd years, two hundred thousand cubic metres of ice, and a street from 1898.

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?