Jinjiang Inn (Harbin Sofia Square)

Walking along the 'Zhongyang...

by PieterB

Walking along the 'Zhongyang Dajie'. This is a pedestrian street where most of the preserved buildings of the period 1905 till 1930 are located. Each such building is marked by a plaque stating when it was build. The people of Harbin also walk this street as an outing. After 3 day's of chinese food for breakfast, lunch and diner, I was very glad to find a French Backery in the Zhongyang Dajie. The croissants where wonderfull and affordable (3 yuan), the cappucino also wonderfull and very expensive (20 yuan).

Tai Yang Dao(Sun island)

by THLIN

This island is one of the most famous place in China.There is a funny saying," visiting Harbin without Tai Yang Dao, you will regret whole life; visiting Tai Yang Dao would make you life-long regret. (Oh,no. It's hard to translate from Chinese to English. )
But here you can see many carving by snow, which are rather giant.
Also, visitor can hire boblet to show around the place, price is okay about RMB 5~RMB 10.

Unit 731 - the Japanese Germ Warfare Museum

by mke1963

After much thought, we decided not to go to visit Unit 731. Our experiences of how Chinese museums depict horrific incidents, including the Rape of Nanjing, would be too much for the children.
Before sending pompous e-mails, note that we have taken the children to Westerbeek in the Netherlands, but decided that 'shock value' photographs are not particularly educational to 10 and 12 year old children.
Had we been on our own, we would have definitely gone to this grisly reminder of man's inhumanity to man.It is also worth noting that many of the Japanese scientists, far from being punished for their experiments, which involved subjecting men, women and children to extremes of heat and cold and viruses including the bubonic plage and smallpox, were taken after the war to the USA, so that others could learn from their horrific experiments. Such is justice in geopolitics.

The Ice Lantern Festival is...

by lexnrena

The Ice Lantern Festival is the biggest event in the area. Look at the Magnatude of these Ice Buildings is what I have to call them.... They are massive.
The duplicate of the Great wall on the right was in fact a 300+ metre ice slide.

Harbin

by mke1963

One hundred years ago, as the first train lumbered across the Songhuajiang railway bridge, little did the Russian railwaymen know that the village they were expanding to serve as a waypoint and servicing yard would develop into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Orient. The village grew quickly between the station and the riverbank, and along the low ridge that ran parallel to the river to the south of the station.
Those railway men built sidings which they lined with sidings, then warehouses and depots. Nearby they constructed wooden, then stone, hotels, offices and all manner of social clubs, schools and hospitals. Just as quickly, the Tsarist 4th Siberian Infantry Division built their barracks, officers quarters, stores, armouries and their little wooden church, dedicated to St Sofia.
The bankers and manufacturers followed, with the merchants, physicians, dentists, missionaries, brothelkeepers and the whole spectrum of Russian civil society. All were anxious to share in the spoils of the mines and factories, warehouses and the burgeoning population, drawn equally by the lure of commerce and wealth. Harbin’s phenomenal growth quickened, and its security, in a vast wilderness of pine and beach forests, great plains and swamps and high mountains. It blossomed into an elegant and welcoming city, where many nationalities and religions worked, lived and died together in the fierce, unforgiving climate. The wooden buildings were rapidly replaced by stone buildings, largely financed by the increasing Jewish population. Harbin may have been a sovereign part of Qing China, but the languages on the streets were as likely to be Russian, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean or German as Chinese. It had been many centuries since the first Jin emperor had built his capital nearby, at Acheng, and it had long disappeared into the grasslands again. Manchurian influence had drifted south towards the Shenyang and Jilin.

Once again, the open grasslands and forests of the Songhua and Amur plains were coming alive, and the whole area became, for a short time, of interest to the Great Powers from Peking to Moscow to Tokyo. Like the cherry, which blossoms on bare twigs in the late winter, so Harbin’s colour came early and didn’t last. The turmoil of the 13 year Japanese occupation, followed by years of civil war. The desperate struggle to industrialise through forty years from the 1950s brought little but smokestack industries, pollution and hardship to Harbin. As the short, stubby chimneys belched black smoke over the city, and austerity and the Cultural Revolution closed down Harbin’s physical and emotional charms, the city and its wonderful architecture. It is not a concern that beautiful old buildings and lifestyles vanished, but astonishment that so much actually managed to survive. Now, at the turn of a new millennium, Harbin is reinventing itself, and slowly coming to realize the value of its legacy in cultural, educational and commercial terms.

Although not without its crass architecture and its fallacious hyperbole, Harbin is genuinely one of the warmest cities in China, especially in the depths of winter.
The architectural legacy is quite astounding, and every corner turned brings a new glorious building, every street a friendly native wanting to talk and share stories. The parks reveal a playful, fun-loving population able to forget the minus 25 degrees temperature, and just get on with walking, exercising, running and throwing snowballs.

There is more information on the history of this region on my Heilongjiang Province page.