China: Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival kicks off
Entertainment
China: Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival kicks off
Harbin, capital of China's frozen northern Heilongjiang province, kicked off its annual International Ice and Snow Festival on Tuesday, with a glittering display of luminous ice.Tourists and locals queued up to enter the festival's ice and snow world, the centrepiece of the festival, which runs until the ice starts to melt in February. Once inside visitors are free to walk around and through enormous replicas of classical palaces, fairytale castles and Asian temples, all made entirely out of ice and illuminated by lights of every colour encased within their structures. While global warming has been making headlines internationally, Harbin is enjoying one of its coldest winters in years, with Tuesday's lowest temperature reaching well below -20 degrees Celsius. The festival, which is now in its 26th year, draws several million tourists from across the country and internationally each year, according to organisers.Local 19-year-old student Huang Runfeng was excited to be at the centre of it. I feel very proud that Harbin has the world's most famous ice and snow world, and that there are so many tourists from around the world. I'm very proud to be from Harbin, he said. As its name suggests, the ice and snow world also features snow sculptures, such as depictions of Buddhist deities that tower high over tourists. For the festival, the city now uses an estimated 120,000 cubic meters of snow and 160,000 cubic meters of ice which is cut in huge translucent blocks from the surface of the Songhua River.The ice of the Songhua is said by locals to be particularly translucent, as it freezes slowly each winter as the river continues to flow beneath and polish it. Chinese know the illuminated sculptures as 'ice lanterns', and the ambitious creations in Harbin are in fact just elaborate versions of ice lanterns people in northern China once used during celebrations or for practical lighting. He Hongyan, a 23-year-old from another area of Heilongjiang province, was finally making her first visit to the festival. I feel really, really excited. Although I'm from Heilongjiang, this is my first time to visit the ice and snow world. I feel that the people of Harbin and Heilongjiang are really great. I'm proud of them, she said. As well as marvelling at the sculptures, visitors can enjoy ice skating, ice cycling, ice mazes, or warm themselves back up with candied fruit on a stick.But for some like Jia Hua, a tourist from China's tropical Guangdong province, the Siberian winds were a little hard to take.It's great fun. It's the first time I've seen this kind of thing before. I'm really happy. But I'm very cold. Us southerners aren't used to this kind of weather. It's too cold. But the ice sculptures look great, she said. And of course no Chinese festival is complete without what the Chinese do best - fireworks, and lots of them.The city of Harbin itself comes alive for the annual festival for which it is renowned within China. As well as the world of ice and snow, other areas of the city play host to often enormous ice and snow sculptures and local authorities organise snow and ice sculpture carving competitions.Also on offer are ice swimming in a hole in the river surface, mass ice weddings, and just about anything else imaginable involving either ice or snow.
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