Ice City of the north — where the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival (the world's largest ice festival, January–February) transforms Harbin into a city of illuminated ice buildings the size of actual buildings, the Russian architectural legacy of St. Sophia Cathedral and Central Street (Zhongyang Dajie) reflects 100 years of Chinese-Russian entanglement in Manchuria, Siberian tigers pace the Siberian Tiger Park at the city's edge, and harbin sausage (a smoked pork sausage brought by Russian immigrants in the 1890s) is one of China's most distinctive regional foods
Harbin (9.4 million city; metro 10.9 million) is the capital of Heilongjiang Province and the largest city in northeastern China (Manchuria) — positioned at the confluence of the Songhua River and on the Chinese Eastern Railway line that Russia built through Manchuria in the 1890s, which transformed a fishing village into an international city of 200,000 in two decades. The city's Russian heritage (the Chinese Eastern Railway was managed by Russia 1897–1935; the Russian population peaked at 120,000 in the 1920s) gives Harbin a unique architectural landscape among Chinese cities — St. Sophia C…
The Harbin area was inhabited by the Tungus-speaking Manchu peoples (ancestors of the Qing dynasty imperial family) and Jurchen peoples for centuries — the Manchu homeland of Manchuria gave the Qing dynasty its ethnic identity. Russia built the Chinese Eastern Railway (1897–1903) through Manchuria as a shortcut to Vladivostok (avoiding the loop around the Manchurian border), creating Harbin as a company town and railway hub staffed by Russian engineers, merchants, Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms (Harbin's Jewish community peaked at 25,000 in the 1920s, one of the largest in Asia), and White R…