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Harbin at 5.00am Harbin had fascinated
me since I'd first read of it whilst preparing for my voyage to China;
a small city in the extreme northern regions of Manchuria with a history
smudged across several occupying cultures, all precariously shouldering
each other for the last century. It is a Manchu township made into a European
style provincial capital, it was the focus of early Japanese interests
in North China and instrumental in the Communist saga of Twentieth Century
China. It is famous for its impossibly cold climate, alcoholism, superb
Russian architecture, annual ice lantern festival, beautiful women and
importantly, its railway line which connects the middle of Siberia through
Mongolia to Vladivostok on the sea of Japan. If not for that railway, the
city would certainly never have become the enigma it is today. It is also,
bizarrely enough considering its remote location, the city where the most
standard Mandarin is pronounced as a local dialect, even purer than is
spoken in Beijing. A train journey of eight hours away from Shenyang, the
city had been a tempting location for a visit since my arrival. Now, with
a mere fortnight left in Shenyang, and considering the Lantern Festival
was now showing, I decided to make a weekend trip of it.
Hotels are not
cheap for a foreigner, and, given that I could only manage a short visit,
I elected to sleep on the train there and back, leaving Sunday night after
my last class, and returning early on Tuesday morning with enough time
to recuperate before my Wednesday night classes began. I had planned to
go alone, but took an opportunity to be guided at the last minute by a
friend of a friend who also had never seen the northern capital of Heilongjiang
(Black Dragon River) province.
It had been
a difficult Sunday. I had accepted a second dinner engagement with my adult
class which had seen the consumption of even more liquor than the first;
according to tradition, every student required the mutual honour of a toast,
which meant sculling a full glass of alcohol, and which also meant I drank
at least three times as much as anyone else. Even more liver-unfriendly
was the introduction of local spirits, Bai Jiu, the foulest variety
of window-cleaner ever served in a glass. I had awoken still swimming in
drink; I cautiously gave classes, allowing more time than usual for student
practice in pairs, by the evening I was quieted with less than usual energy.
I had no luggage
save a plastic bag of snacks for the train. I arrived with my escort at
the train station in the dark and cold, thick with excess clothing to prepare
for temperatures of less than 35 degrees below centigrade in Harbin. Searchlights
arranged the mist into columns upholding the layers of cloud and snow,
at the station grubby merchants and beggars hunched close to old brick
walls, there was the smoke and smell of cooked stringy meats from small
lamplit glass stalls and a host of overzealous taxi drivers offering to
transport me to the hotel of their choice, in the hope that I was arriving
rather than departing. One middle-aged woman in a uniform offered us the
opportunity to bypass the cold, dirty waiting room, a preferential early
boarding of the train for a mere 10 yuan. She was a corrupt ticket agent,
we decided that given the cold, it would be money well spent.
We were quite
wrong. Led through the gates a half hour before the departure of the train
served only to leave us stranded on the platform, owing to the fact that
the train had to arrive before it departed, and this would occur just a
few minutes before the scheduled time. In plain language, we had purchased
the right to stand outside in the cold instead of sit inside, so that we
might be first in the queue when the train came. There was noone to complain
to, we found ourselves standing next to a small group of dangerous looking
men carrying long taped-together pipes which seemed rather likely to be
weapons. We moved nervously closer to a gathering of passengers. It was
ill-lit, and thick white steam rose from vents beneath the platform floor.
Old carriages and train engines waited on the tracks, in the smoke it could
well have been the 1940's again, Kuo Ming Tang nationalists fleeing the
oncoming People's Army headed for Shenyang.
The train arrived,
and we fought the rush of rested and warm oncoming passengers from the
waiting room for a way on to the train, before finally locating our allotted
sleeping berths. They were barely the width of a human being, bunks stacked
four-high and arranged as close together as possible, a hard mattress with
a pillow and duvet. The train was considerably warmer than I'd expected;
I had to remove most of the extra clothes I'd put on for Harbin, stacked
uncomfortably at the foot of my bed where my legs would be unnaturally
pressed against them all night for lack of room.
Despite all
this, the train ride was acceptably comfortable. I had read accounts before
of Chinese train travel, Theroux talks about unheated carriages and unforgiving
attendants ripping blankets away at early hours of the morning. This has
changed, the facilities on board were liveable enough, and I found the
hard bunks allowed for a heavy night's sleep after all. I awoke a few times
during the night; my pillow was right up against the train window, so I
took the chance to pull aside the curtain where possible to catch glimpses
of remote parts of Jilin and Heilongjiang. The railside country failed
to change all night, a line of thin trees marked the boundary of a featureless
terrain of grassland covered in snow.
The awakening was polite and unintrusive, allowing for an hour of bleariness before our arrival in Harbin at 4.30am. I felt sufficiently rested, if insufficiently slept; I dressed quickly and sat for three quarters of an hour sweating uncomfortably beneath six layers of clothing. Everyone had made the same comment when I mentioned my plan to see Harbin - it's cold, wear more clothes. When the train pulled in at the station, I prepared for the rush of frozen air as the doors opened. As we made our way out of the station, the first surprise was that it wasn't so cold after all. This isn't to say that it wasn't cold - it was very cold indeed. However, after a winter in Shenyang, the difference of a few degrees was hardly felt. After a walk around the darkened streets surrounding the station, I was still overheated - I'd not heard any accounts of being hot in the Harbin winter, and so this particular discomfort was a surprise. Small Hours on the Harbin Streets Just before leaving Shenyang, I realised I'd made an important miscalculation. My intention had been to see the Ice Lantern festival, where enormous structures made entirely of ice frozen around coloured neon tubes spectacularly transformed Zhaolin park into an otherworldly city of ice and light; however, my arrival in the morning and departure in the evening made any extraordinary night-time display unlikely. My only hope was to see the display before the sun rose - friends in Shenyang had told me that the lanterns are left on all night, and so we made our way directly to the park. The lights were out and the gates were locked. For a moment, it was a crushing disappointment, however we lucked upon a guard who told us that he couldn't let us in until after sunrise; however, he reminded us that the sun set at just 4.30pm in the afternoon when the lights would be illuminated, allowing us a good three hours to see the display before our train was due to leave at 7.30 that evening. Thus did we find ourselves wandering the streets of inner-city Harbin at 5.00am. Another flaw in the plan was that there was not likely to be anywhere open to rest until at least another couple of hours had passed, and the air was much too cold for staying outdoors longer than another hour. We made the best we could out of the circumstances, two shivering figures admiring the unusual architecture and ice brickwork, which was everywhere. Far from being confined to the park, ice buildings were distributed all around, edifices built on to shop fronts, neon lanterns lining the streets in blocks of ice, carved lions and dragons on street corners. It created a favourable atmosphere, lending a sense of fun and art to coldly functional roadways.
However, without the instructions of a particularly helpful passer-by which helped us to locate a 24 hour diner, the morning would have become extremely uncomfortable. We drank hot bean soup and dozed at the table until dawn. In the brightening white streetways of solid storefronts and Russian onion-domed rooves, I found a KFC where I could get a weak coffee and wash at their handbasin. Photos of the Harbin Early Morning St Sophia Church
Nearby KFC was the impressive St Sofia church, an Eastern Orthodox house of worship that wouldn't have looked out of place in Moscow. We prepared ourselves for an austere, hallowed interior, 10 yuan later we entered into what was evidently a tacky shop selling miniature badges of the church. Fortunately, beyond the sales table was an extraordinary assortment of old photographs which traced the history of Harbin from its humble beginnings as a fishing village before the Russians arrived with their railway plans in 1896, to its thickening Chinese, Japanese and Russian population before the Second World War. The scenes told much; elegant white families strode confidently past hunched dirty Chinese and Manchu merchants; storefront signs in Hirakana and Cyrillic characters. It was an uncomfortable mixture of incompatibles; newspaper clippings depicting Chinese dancers in hybrid costumes and poses suggested what an interesting time Harbin must have been in those days. Harbin was confidently China's only following the Communist takeover of 1946, Russian families only more recently making a reappearance here. Harbin was the only place where I was greeted in Russian by streetsellers associating a white face with an easy sale, which I interpreted as being better than being taken for an American. Walking outside, I found I liked Harbin very much. After the sturdy old sooty block housing of Shenyang, the craftsmanship evident in the buildings of the interior city were pleasing to the eye. Locals appeared in the best of health; clean, pink-faced, tall and slender girls validated their reputation as the babes of the north, and the men too were strong and smooth-faced. Their Mandarin was clearly and professionally uttered, not the buzzing throats of Liao Ning. Here in this staunchly soviet township, lovely, cultured Chinese people braved the cold and walked tall through gorgeously decorate streets. Taken for a Ride Across the Song Hua Jiang It was on Harbin's prettiest street, Zhong Yang Da Jie, a pedestrian mall leading down to the river bank, that we were greeted by an 'official' tour guide offering us a tour of the attractions along the river at a reduced cost. I was irritated by her pestering, however, she managed to convince my companion to accept her services for half of what she had asked for, 120 yuan. We ignored 'ice world', a 16,000,000 yuan installation erected for the first time this year to encourage tourism - it contained life-sized ice and snow sculptures of famous buildings, and charged an 80 yuan admission fee. I took a picture of the Arc de Triomphe and some cathedrals from the gate. Our new guide, an elderly lady with a dubious ID card around her neck, led us to the frozen Song Hua where her husband awaited with a horse and buggy. We took a bumpy ride halfway across the river, stopping at the 'ice swimming' attraction where crazies in speedos displayed themselves swimming in the river, a swimming pool having been cut in the ice which was over a metre thick. Admission to this show appeared to be additional to the guided tour. Our guide attempted entry but was stopped at the door, which gave me to further suspicions about her value. The swimmers were a fair sight, naked skin suffering extreme temperatures and excited Russians parading around the pool in very little clothing, addressing the crowd in English, Russian and Chinese. A girl in traditional Russian costume held aloft a Russian flag, a fat girl in a bathing suit pulled spectator's gloves away to shake icy hands with them. A Korean observer next to me advised that were any uninitiated swimmer to attempt the dive, death would be near instantaneous as all blood rushed to the centre of the body and a massive heart failure followed. The swimmers looked in good health to me, especially considering that many were in their seventies. Outside again, our guide took us across to the Sun Island resort, a popular sanatorium in summer months. In this season it is the site of a series of snow sculptures, which, after yet another admission fee, I found to be remarkably less interesting than ice sculptures. It's impossible to keep snow pristine white when sculpting, it appears, so I looked over a parade of grey sculptures, admittedly skilfully done. Whilst in the park, I debated with my escort about the benefits of our new guide, who so far hadn't saved us a cent. We wondered whether, now that she had been paid, she'd still be waiting for us upon our exit from the park. She was, which did suggest that she had some decency about her; this appearance was lost when, upon our reseating in the horse buggy, she demanded a tip for waiting. We paid an extra 5 yuan, making for a 65 yuan horse ride across the river, which would have otherwise been an interesting walk. She had begged for the tip, I momentarily reconsidered my otherwise highly positive impression of the Harbin Chinese people, and conceded that perhaps she too had a child who needed college fees paid for in the hope of avoiding such a degrading career as his mother had resorted to. I wondered how many of my own student's parents were in similar positions. Photographs of the Overpriced Tour Zhaolin Park's Ice Lantern Festival
It was almost 4.30 by the time we arrived back on the city side of the Song Hua, so we made our way directly to Zhaolin park. As the morning guard had advised, it was indeed getting dark at the time we came to the gates, and the lanterns had been lit impressively. A 30 yuan entry fee proved well worth the extraordinary display we were treated to within. There were scored of life-sized buildings which we could walk through, replicas of well known landmarks, fantasy castles, gigantic temples and slides. We crawled through a maze of ice, ascended staircases and walked through boulevards, all frozen without thought of melting, dry to the touch. A series of fine sculptures sat near the centre, my guide booked advised that traditional Chinese themes had once been the norm, but that comic characters, Mickey Mouse, were more likely subjects now. Times had apparently changed again, nude girls were the order of the day, slender transparent female forms twisted around birds and fish. Near them, an enormous pagoda capped a steep hill, rising above a broad bridgeway and a map of the country. It took a good couple of hours to take it all in, after which we managed a meal at a local restaurant, seeking the Russian food for which Harbin is known, having long incorporated Russian methods into their Chinese cooking. Instead we could only locate old favourites, eggplant and dumplings, and an adequate bottle of Harbin beer, also of good name throughout China. We managed to decipher the bus system easily enough to locate a bus back to the station, and boarded the train with minutes to spare. This was a more expensive class of sleeper train, the only that had been available at the time when we'd booked; the luxuries for which we'd paid an extra 80 yuan were non apparent. I managed to sleep relatively fitfully given the early napping hour, and before long found myself in a taxi back home in Shenyang, gloriously dirty in comparison with its handsome twin I'd just departed several hours before. Lan Ting was still a home of sorts, and my own shower and bed felt as satisfying as they deserved to be. |
