Harbin

Every year, the northern city of Harbin puts on a festival that features structures — sometimes delicate, oftentimes gigantic and always beautiful — built entirely out of snow and ice.  This year's festival is no different. It features frozen worlds, ice dragons and even the occasional penguin parade.  Take a visual tour of the 36th Harbin Ice and Snow Festival 2020. 

Harbin Ice and Snow World, one of the world’s largest ice and snow theme parks, opened to the public in northeastern China on December 23, 2019. The frozen attraction in Heilongjiang province is linked to the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival which opens on January 5, 2020.

Each winter, about 100 workers toil on the frozen Songhua River in Harbin to harvest ice for the city’s famed Ice and Snow Festival, the largest of its kind in the world. The blocks will be moved to the capital of China’s northeastern province of Heilongjiang where they will be shaped into giant crystal palaces and sculptures at the event opening in early January. 

Harbin, in China’s far northeast, owes its modern beginnings entirely to a railway. For the first three decades of the 20th century, it was effectively a Russian city. It is a place that has sparked my curiosity ever since I came across a 1927 ship’s passenger list that revealed the name of my grandfather Frank Newman’s “second wife”: Nina Kovaleva, 25, born in Sevastopol, Russia. He would leave his Shanghai-based family with her in the early 1930s. The list also named a daughter, Kyra, aged five, born in Harbin. It was a stunning revela­tion. It implied that my grandfather, an inspector for the Harbin postal sub­district from about 1912, had led a double life for at least a decade. I conta