Harbin Ice Festival China

The ground is totaly flat and vacant in summer. Everything you see is snow and ice.

<Page1> Harbin Ice Festival

tunnel snow and ice festival harbin china

A maze of hallways with walls and floors of solid ice designed to cause as many spills as possible.  Many people tried it out, and the design appeared to be quite successful.  Here, a father keeps his son on his feet while trying to keep himself on his feet.  Most kids were so bundled up this night that had they fallen, they wouldn't have noticed.

Ice mountain snow and ice festival harbin china

A key attraction of the ice festival two years ago was a copy of the Great Wall of China that doubled as a long ice slide.  This year's key attraction was a copy of the Summer Palace in Beijing, as shown here - complete with the Tower of Buddhist Fragrance, the seventeen-arch bridge (reduced to seven arches), and even Empress Dowager Cixi's marble boat. 

centre piece snow and ice festival harbin china

Four flights of ice stairs lead up to an ice tower tens of meters high serving as the centerpiece to the festival grounds.  The good news is that, unlike past festivals, the icy stairs now had handrails.  The bad news is that they too were made of ice.

Bar

This was the bar sculpted from snow. Inside it was packed with people. Smoke was so thick, I quickly got my wine and got out. The wine here is very potent; this stuff will really warm you up in these -25 C temperatures.

snow and ice festival harbin china

Structures throughout the festival were made to resemble famous buildings in Europe and Asia - including the Louvre in Paris, complete with its pyramids

sled snow and ice festival harbin china

This complex also included an ice slide, which was more like a luge track; bodies flew by in a blur and at the bottom thumped solidly into a two-meter-high snow bank.

Ski snow and ice festival harbin china

The landscape is very flat, but a cab driver did manage to find me a little hill to ski down from an hours drive from town.

snow and ice festival harbin china

Sculptures appearing in the festival included horses, ships, Korean dancers, a giant snow Buddha (complete with an altar where people worshiped and planted burning incense sticks in the snow), and of course, snowmen.  A small Chinese automobile company even displayed full-sized ice sculptures of its cars alongside its real cars as a promotion.