Related Heilongjiang Sheng Favorites Tips

Favorite thing: The 1200 members of the Hezhen nationality, one of China’s smaller groups, live in the area around Tongjiang, where the mighty Heilongjiang meets the smaller Songhuajiang. The lives of these intriguing people revolve solidly around the rivers, lakes and fish. They even wear clothing and shoes made from fish skins.

The Daur nationality living in Inner Mongolia and up the Gan He and Nen Jiang river, south-west of the town of Heihe. They have proved more able to move from hunting and fishing activities to pastoral and settled livelihoods, although without leaving their traditional areas: perhaps a useful role model for the Oroqen.

China struggles with its minorities, relentlessly trumpeting the harmony of all its fifty-six nationalities in the media and in tourist literature, yet failing to do much to help preserve or sustain their diversity. The effervescent sympathetic output of the scores of minority-oriented institutes and universities in China is at complete odds with the shallow and rather pathetic commercialization of cultural traditions, and the inability to allow different economic or social models that would sustain these traditional communities. Politicians and economists are regularly heard referring to the ‘backwardness’ of minority groups, especially when the minorities refuse to accede to resettlement or dams or other ‘development’ projects. On this matter, China is acting no differently, of course, from the politicians, planners and economists in other countries, including the UK and the USA. Sadly, few societies in the world today really allow traditional communities or livelihoods to persists.

Favorite thing: The long winter months are fierce in Heilongjiang; this area is really on the edge of Siberia, and not all that long ago, China's borders used to extend up across the Heilongjiang/Amur river into what is now called Siberia. The province has a continental climate, with cool pleasant summers (like northern Scandinavia or Canada), but the winters are ferociously cold (like, errr, northern Scandinavia or Canada). From December through to March, the temperature drops to minus 25-30 degrees Celsius, coming up to about minus 12-20 degrees during the day. Our experience (in early February) was that the temperature soared quickly to minus 13 during the morning, then started to drop slowly after noon to about minus 15 by four o'clock. After that, it dropped fast, losing a couple of degrees every hour. The temperature difference between about 3pm and 7pm seemed enormous. Being outdoors when warmly dressed at 3pm was bearable, but after about 7pm it was horrendous: eyes constantly watering, breath freezing instantly on scarves, inhaling air that cold was simply unpleasant. It astonished me that people actually live and sustain themselves in this frigid climate, but they do. It gave me considerably increased respect for the people of Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and throughout Siberia.