Harbin, a city built out of ice

Harbin spends its winters around twenty degrees below zero, and instead of hiding from that it built a festival on it. Every December, crews cut blocks from the frozen Songhua River and stack them into the Ice and Snow World, a temporary city of towers, palaces and slides lit from inside by coloured LEDs, big enough to walk for hours. Across the river on Sun Island, sculptors work in packed snow at monumental scale, while Zhaolin Park keeps the older, gentler tradition of carved ice lanterns that started here in 1963.

The rest of the year the city is a Russian story. Harbin grew from a railway camp on the Chinese Eastern Railway, the tsarist shortcut to Vladivostok, and by the 1920s it held tens of thousands of Russian residents plus a substantial Jewish community. Their legacy is Saint Sophia Cathedral, a green-domed Orthodox church founded in 1907 and rebuilt in brick by 1932 now standing alone on its square, and Central Street, a 1.4-kilometre pedestrian avenue paved with rounded cobbles and lined with Art Nouveau and Baroque facades.

Eat accordingly. Harbin's hongchang, a smoked red sausage of Lithuanian ancestry, is sold by the metre; guobaorou, pork in a crackling sweet-and-sour glaze, was invented here for Russian diners; and locals queue outdoors in January for Madie'er ice cream bars. Add a Harbin beer, brewed since 1900, the oldest brand in China. Beyond the centre, the Siberian Tiger Park and the Volga Manor estate fill an afternoon. Come in January for the festival at full strength and pair it with the classic sights further south in China.