Harbin

An Orthodox church put up in timber in 1907 and rebuilt in brick by 1932. It holds old photographs of the city now rather than services. The wide square in front fills in winter with people feeding pigeons on the snow.

Granite blocks dressed round like loaves pave the whole 1.4 kilometres of pedestrian street. Laid in 1924 and still the same stones, they turn slick once snow packs down. The frontages borrow from Renaissance and Baroque, storey by storey.

Go in after dark. The lamps are frozen inside the blocks, so by day it reads as white lumps. Buildings are stacked from ice cut out of the Songhua and rebuilt every year, opening late December and closing at the thaw. Hours outside get to your toes first.

The ice lantern tradition began in this park in 1963. Small and central, it takes an hour of an evening rather than a night, with the carvings close enough to touch.

Once the winter ice thickens, the whole river turns into a playground. Horse sledges and ice bicycles work the surface and some people simply walk across. The monument on the bank marks holding back the flood of 1957.

In summer you get lawns and birch woods; in winter the same ground carries the snow sculpture show. It lies across the river, reached by boat in the warm months and by cable car or bridge once the water freezes.

No ticket is needed to get onto the roof. The hall went up beside the wetland in 2015, wrapped in white aluminium that carries roof and wall as one surface. A walkway over the top is left open to the river and the marsh.

It is 190 kilometres east of Harbin, an hour by train since the high-speed line opened in 2018. The vertical is large enough that beginner and expert runs sit on separate peaks. The season runs late November to March, midwinter afternoons under minus twenty.

The street carries a Russian novelist's name, and arched windows and iron balconies run down both sides of it. At the end stands Saint Alexeyev's, red brick trimmed in white, the reverse of Saint Sophia's colouring.

Chinese merchants in the 1920s pinned European ornament onto the street fronts and nothing else. Walk through a gateway and a courtyard opens behind it, ringed by a first-floor gallery. That split between face and interior is what gave the quarter its name.

A Siberian tiger breeding centre opened in 1996, toured in a caged bus through zones where the tigers roam loose. Live chickens and meat thrown from the bus are priced separately, so the squeamish should know that before buying a ticket.

Where the Japanese army's Unit 731 ran human experiments in the war with China. It lies about 20km south of the centre in Pingfang district, and a new hall opened in 2015 beside the ruined boiler house. Some rooms forbid photography, so follow the signs.

A temple founded in 1924 with a seven-storey pagoda beside it. A few stops from the Russian facades downtown come red walls and incense smoke, proof the railway did not make the whole city. Lunar-month days one and fifteen draw the crowds.

Russian-style timber buildings and gardens on Harbin's south-eastern edge. At its centre is a copy of the city's St Nicholas Cathedral, torn down in the Cultural Revolution. Birch paths follow the river, and many come for snow photographs in winter.