Dazzling Lights of Ice Festival Help Thaw Wintry Grip on Chinese City

HARBIN, China —  During the long winter months, as icy winds blow in from Siberia, street market vegetable seller Zhao Guilian spends her days trying to keep her spicy green chili peppers from freezing.

Zhao advertises her produce by placing a single pepper, frozen hard as an ice cube, on top of a thick blue-gray quilt that envelops the rest of her supply.

The peppers, which come by rail from South China, are wrapped “so they won’t freeze,” Zhao, herself bundled in padded trousers and down parka, explained cheerfully.

Nearby fish sellers have it easy. Frozen squid shipped from the coast and 30-inch salmon from local northeast China rivers need only the brutally cold air to protect them from spoilage.

Mid-winter days in Harbin typically hit highs of zero degrees Fahrenheit, with overnight lows at minus 15 degrees.

Chinese Version of Disneyland

But, like a handful of other cities that year after year face a long, dreary and frigid winter, Harbin has found ways to brighten the season. Most spectacular of its glories is the 2-month-long Ice Lantern Festival, in which 1,500 ice sculptures--most of them with internal wiring and colored lights--transform a Harbin park into a frozen Chinese version of Disneyland. Now in its 14th year, the festival opens in early January and draws more than 20,000 visitors every evening through the end of February.

A 20-foot-high, 40-foot-long ice dragon, marking this as the Year of the Dragon by the Chinese lunar calendar, stands at the park entrance. There are traditional Chinese pavilions cut from ice, with names taken from the classic Chinese novel of the late 17th Century, “Dream of the Red Chamber.” And providing an international touch, this year there is even a 50-foot-high Cinderella’s castle.

Several of the sculptures, including one of the exits from Cinderella’s castle and an undulating 80-foot-long dragon, also serve as ice slides for children and the more athletic adults.

Ice sculptures have become part of the winter culture of Harbin. Scattered around the city are dragons, lions and peacocks carved in ice. Often they stand in front of government office buildings and near important monuments. Despite frequent sunshine, moderate snowfall and pollution from the smoke of coal heating fires, most sculptures remain in fairly good condition until early March.

Harbin Penguins

Harbin’s winter also offers other pleasures. Children enjoy schoolyard skating rinks. Families take weekend outings to the frozen expanses of the half-mile-wide Songhua River, where peasants offer horse-sled rides for a fee. And a small but famous band of physical fitness fanatics called the Harbin Penguins maintains a tradition of quick morning swims where the three-foot-thick ice over the Songhua has been chopped away.

Harbin’s cuisine also reflects adaptation to the long winters. The difficulty of storing vegetables has led to a tradition of making suan cai --pickled cabbage that keeps for months stored in huge ceramic jars. Spicy Korean pickles-- kimchi --are also popular here, sold in street markets by members of the city’s 40,000-strong Korean minority.

A sort of Chinese version of fondue, in which thin strips of mutton and various vegetables are cooked in a pot on a table-top burner, is especially popular here. Bean curd dishes cooked and served in ceramic pots are another warming favorite.

But when people are fighting zero-degree cold, how warm the food is doesn’t always seem to matter. Harbin residents are famous for eating ice cream while strolling outside even in the dead of winter. Street vendors also sell sticks of candied crab apples or orange sections during the winter.

“Summer’s too hot--no one eats them then because they melt,” explained Shan Yantie, a peddler of candied crab apples who was plying his trade in Stalin Park, on the edge of the river.

Ice Lantern Festival

The solidly frozen Songhua Jiang--the River of Pines and Flowers that is famous throughout China for its scenery in both summer and winter--becomes a giant winter park and playground. It also provides the building blocks of the Ice Lantern Festival.

A work unit whose primary task is to cut out and store ice for summer use sells the city 12,000 cubic meters of Songhua River ice for the sculptures, according to Zhu Xianqi, an engineer who is deputy director of the festival.

Liu Hongru, who on a recent morning was supervising minor repair work on some sculptures, explained that long iron stakes are driven into the river ice to break loose blocks measuring 3 feet by 6 feet.

“Then they use hooks and ropes to pull the ice blocks from the river, and they bring them here by truck,” Liu said.

Regular carpenter’s saws, and also a three-foot-diameter electric power saw, specially designed and mounted for use in festival work, are used to cut the ice into smaller blocks. These are then assembled and carved by artists, laborers and electricians to build the ice lanterns.

Ice Carpenters

“The ice lanterns are built by major state-owned companies in Harbin,” Liu said. “They hire some carpenters who work as professional carpenters during the summer. My father was a carpenter, and I’m a carpenter myself. It’s interesting to work with ice, too.”

During December, 2,500 people work for three weeks to carve the ice sculptures, festival deputy director Zhu said.

The first city-sponsored Ice Lantern Festival was held in 1963, as China was recovering from the disastrous economic policies of the Great Leap Forward, when impractical industrialization schemes led to insufficient agricultural efforts and widespread starvation.

“That was right after things had gotten better, after a difficult period,” Zhu said. “The purpose was to enliven the spiritual life of the people. The festival was stopped during the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976). Then it was started again in 1978. It’s getting bigger every year.

“If Harbin didn’t have this kind of activity, everybody would stay inside during the winter, watching television or movies. Life is richer if there are outdoor activities, too.

“Winter starts in November and goes until the end of March. But people are used to it. By May 1, the grass begins to appear and leaves are coming out. People here are very happy to have spring come.”