The Harbin Ice and Snow Festival

Blocks are cut from the frozen Songhua in December, hauled out and stacked into full-scale architecture: gate towers, ramparts, staircases and slides several hundred metres long, with coloured lights sunk into the ice so the whole build glows from within after dark. That is Ice and Snow World, put up from scratch each winter and gone by spring. Across the river on Sun Island a separate park works in packed snow, carved into figures and reliefs that read better by daylight. In the city itself, Zhaolin Park keeps the older ice lantern tradition at a smaller scale, and the pedestrian Central Street is lined with early twentieth-century European facades.

What you actually see

• Ice and Snow World - full-scale buildings in river ice, lit from inside after dark.
• The ice slides - long chutes cut into the main towers and ridden on a mat.
• Sun Island snow sculpture - large packed-snow carving, best seen in daylight.
• Zhaolin Park ice lanterns - the smaller and older version of the same idea.

When to go

The main parks open in early January and run into February, and the ice is at its best in January. Reach the ice park at dusk to see it in daylight and then lit, and give the snow park a separate daytime slot. Beds and flights around the new year need booking well in advance.

Honest expectations

This is genuinely severe cold, often below minus twenty at night and worse with wind, and the display is at its best exactly when standing outside is hardest. Phone batteries die within minutes. Tickets are expensive and rise at peak, queues for the big slides run long, and costumed photo touts work the crowds hard.

Nearby

Central Street and the Songhua embankment are in the city, and the tiger park lies north of the river.