China's kingdom of ice

China London - Arabstoday At first we didn’t understand the an in the mink hat. His family was giggling at his frantic sign language and it was only when he pulled a camera from his pocket that we realised what he wanted. A pair of Western women is so rare in Harbin that we were worth capturing for the family album. Even on the plane from Shanghai, my friend and I were the only Westerners, but then Harbin is as remote as it gets, way up in northern China, on a par with Vladivostok. You would think that a city in the middle of snowy tundra, where temperatures can plummet to -40F (-40C), would be unlikely to draw visitors. Yet Harbin epitomises China’s entrepreneurial spirit, transforming its brutal northern climate into its biggest asset. Twelve years ago, Harbin’s inhabitants dreamt up the Snow and Ice Festival, and every December they build a city out of ice and fill Harbin’s parks with snow and ice sculptures. The Chinese flock here for the two-month festival and slowly international tourism is waking up to this extraordinary event. Night is the time to visit the ice city because it is lit from within, so that it shimmers with brilliant colours that change every few seconds. The cityscape includes pagodas, towers, castles and bridges – the sheer scale is breathtakingly spectacular. It’s wildly beautiful but also majestically, Walt Disney-on-acid kitsch. Sun Island, a huge park, is given over entirely to an exhibition of snow sculpture and during our visit there was an Italian theme, with a gigantic Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the towering heads of Medusa and Athena, and Michelangelo’s David. We went one bitterly cold but dazzling morning and met a merry group of Manchurians in traditional full-length scarlet coats and fur hats, dragging each other around on wooden sledges. Later, as it grew dark, we went to the Ice-Lantern Garden Party in Zhaolin Park, which houses Harbin’s international competition for ice sculptors. Throughout the park are big blocks of ice, on which keen amateur sculptors can set to work. These are stunning enough, but the work of the real artists is on display in a tented pavilion. Here ice is chiselled into sinuous and complex shapes – a Thai dragon with finely etched scales, arrow-sharp tail and long tongue; Alice’s face through an ice looking-glass; a stag with elaborate antlers fighting off a leopard – the craftsmanship defies belief. Harbin still feels like a frontier town, despite its 10 million population and its determination to put itself on the global tourist map. Restaurants and cafés aimed at foreign visitors are virtually non-existent and the huge Japanese restaurant next to the ice city turned out to be a dismal empty hall with some enterprising young people selling snacks from plastic boxes. In the ice city itself, people were offering to take photographs of us for money but there were no hot drinks for sale, as if the fine details of this enormous endeavour had yet to be worked out. But Harbin is built on a solid industrial base of coal, oil, chemicals and aeroplane parts and is growing steadily. It is said that China devours enough steel and concrete annually to build seven New Yorks and driving out of Harbin, it’s easy to believe. There are more cranes than you can possibly count. On the streets, new wealth is clearly in evidence – there is plenty of sleek fur trimming the fashionable puffa jackets of the young and warmly cloaking the elderly, while designer handbags and the latest mobile phones are much in evidence. In the modern Shangri-La Hotel, where we stayed and ate one night in the restaurant, tough-looking businessmen in new leather jackets talked over deals in private dining rooms. Though Harbin feels as if it is on the cusp of establishing itself, it was a Manchurian settlement as early as the 10th century and is steeped in history. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jews fleeing persecution in Russia began crossing the border, helped by the completion of the East China Railway. They bought or established coal mines, sugar refineries and oil mills and soon Harbin was a flourishing centre for European culture, full of theatres, concert halls and sturdy mansions. At one time there were around 25,000 Jews in Harbin. Though many left for Israel in 1948, Huangshan remains the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East and Harbin’s synagogue (China’s biggest) houses a fascinating display of photographs, showing groups of finely dressed European Jews outside their mansions and factories or in their banks or stores. Some of this European legacy also survives in the fin-de-siècle architecture along Central Street. Built in 1898, the street is one of Asia’s longest and widest pedestrian thoroughfares, and is still home to the once glamorous Modern Hotel. Hoping for iced vodka and caviar, we went to dinner in its Russian Restaurant. In a dismal, violently over-lit ballroom, heavy square tables stood in rows among marble pillars. Maroon velvet curtains hung at windows, dusty and fading. It was practically deserted. A waitress sauntered forward and eventually brought huge laminated menus with photographs (no caviar in sight). Under the chandeliers, we resigned ourselves to frozen, microwaved food and were subjected to blaring Muzak – pop tunes Rachmaninov style. We left via a corridor lined with neglected glass cases displaying tarnished silver cutlery, elaborate samovars, porcelain and crystal from a long-gone era when the hotel was the fulcrum of Harbin’s glittering social scene. While this was a throwback to Harbin’s past, much else in the city looked forward. I had not been to China before and Harbin was an ideal starting point from which to understand the country’s ability to adapt and embrace change. But even leaving this aside, along with the city’s cultural heritage, the Ice Festival alone is enough to justify the long journey – a glowing emblem of China’s extraordinarily inventive and continually evolving spirit.