HEILONGJIANG
PROVINCE

Harbin
Harbin is just about the northern-most city that visitors to China can visit. In the winter, it is bitterly, bitterly cold, conjuring up images of the Siberian wastes which lie to the north. In the summer, however, it is as hot as just about anywhere else in the country. Travel to Harbin is most pleasant, therefore, during the warmer months, but as far as I'm concerned the northeast of China is only really the northeast during the winter, and that's when visitors should go, weighed down by padded coats and three pairs of socks to really experience what the word 'cold' means.

The city of Harbin is one of the most distinctive in China due to the heavy Russian influence still apparent in the architecture. The city once had the largest European population of any city in Asia, and was often known as the Paris of the Orient for its sophistication and the Moscow of the East for its large number of Russian residents, many of them refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution. It was founded in 1898 by the Russians on the site of a small fishing village, and grew as an important junction on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

'The long afternoons and evenings are gay with dinners and parties and the nightlife rivals that of Shanghai,' said one guidebook writer in the 1920s. Walking around, it is not hard to imagine what a splendid place it must have been.

The middle of the town is full of impressive Russian-style houses, shops and hotels, many of them ornamented with the iron lattice-work which was so popular in that by-gone age. Ancient trams continue to trundle along the streets of the city, many of them still cobbled. Overall, central Harbin looks, perhaps, like a tatty replica of nineteenth-century St Petersburg. A few Russian Orthodox churches still exist, including one magnificent bronze-domed cathedral (in the alleys west of Diduan Lu and north of Tiandi Jie) which dominates the centre of the city. None of them is now used for religious purposes. The cathedral was obviously ransacked and closed during the Cultural Revolution, and is now in a very sorry state, with bricked-up windows and a gaping hole in the roof. When I visited the church, there was a sign on the padlocked back door which read: 'No urinating allowed here. Offenders will be fined 10 yuan.'

Since the Communist victory in 1949, Harbin has become a major industrial centre and the home of nearly two million people. The White Russian population, which in the 1920s numbered over 100000, has evaporated over the years, leaving only 57 still living in the city in 1982. The others died or emigrated, mostly to Australia or Brazil. A few of those left live in the Foreigners' Old People's Home in the suburbs of Harbin, which also houses a number of other people washed up in China by the tides of history, including a number of old Japanese women left over from the occupation, and two stateless American women, Marjorie and Seraphine Fuller, who say they are waiting for the Euphrates River to dry up as a sign that the end of the world is imminent.



Apart from the architecture, there appears to be little Russian influence left in Harbin now, unless you count a park named after Joseph Stalin down by the river and the borsch soup served by a number of hotel restaurants. But the old buildings, mostly painted pale yellow, remain as evidence of a more glorious past, glorious at least for the foreigners who were part of the glamorous Harbin social whirl. The Chinese citizenry presumably suffered the usual deprivations to keep the foreigners in the style to which they were accustomed.

During the Japanese occupation of China up to 1945, a village, Pingfang, 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Harbin became the home of a secret Japanese germ warfare establishment where prisoners of war, including some European (and probably some British) soldiers were subjected to horrors probably unparalleled in human history except for the Nazi concentration camp atrocities.

The Japanese 731st regiment experimented on live human beings, or 'logs of wood' as those involved called them. The Japanese 'doctors' injected cholera, syphilis and plague germs into their victims to monitor the effects, and froze people alive under observation in order to explore the workings of frostbite. They exposed their captives to prolonged X-rays, and carried out hundreds of dissections on living people. The horror of it all is hard to grasp. The full details of Regiment 731'S deeds have never been revealed, and much of the information is in Washington where it was taken at the end of the war by the Americans, who hoped to make use of it.

According to a book published in Japan recently, The Devil's Gluttony', the research carried out in Harbin was indeed important. The regiment succeeded in mass-producing penicillin several years before their counterparts in the West and did pioneering work on the effects of vitamin and nutrition deficiency - by systematically starving the camp inmates, of course. In the search for a substitute for human blood, they drained one prisoner and pumped him full of horse blood.

One of the former regiment officers interviewed by the book's author, Masaki Shimozato, recalled a prisoners' revolt just before the end of the war in 1945: 'The Russians had broken out of their chains. We all ran to the cells with our pistols. There were 40 or 50. All of them were killed.' At the end of the war, some sort of deal was struck between the regiment's commanders and the Americans whereby all their data would be handed over in return for freedom from prosecution. Many of those involved went on to become prominent doctors and medical researchers in Japan. The compound at Pingfang, has since been razed to the ground, and there is nothing to see.

To get to downtown Harbin from the International Hotel, take a No.16 bus. The best streets for walking round are Zhongyang Jie and Shangzhi Jie, both of which have a number of good restaurants along their lengths. Close to the river, the No. i6 bus passes ZHAOLUN PARK, one of the city's biggest, which in winter becomes a fairyland of ice sculptures. Meanwhile not far from the No.16 bus terminus is the SONGHUA UVER and a monument to people who died in a river flood in the 1950s. During the winter there are ice slides down from the promenade on to the frozen river surface. You can also rent skates and glide about above the fishes.

There are not many excursions possible or worthwhile from Harbin. There are trains to DAQING, China's largest oilfield northwest of the city, but there's little to see there except for the vast, dismal expanses of the Manchurian plain dotted with oil rigs. To the north is the city of QIQIHAR, but few foreigners are allowed to go there. Winter sport enthusiasts might try applying to visit QINGYUN, the biggest ski centre in China, which opened in late 1982.

How to get there and where to stay
There are direct flights to Harbin from Peking, and also daily trains. Harbin is not on the regular tourist route, and there are few hotels open to foreigners. Most people stay in the International Hotel (Guoji Fandian; take a No.1 trolley bus or a No. i6 bus from the station), which is a pleasant, comfortable old place left over from the Russian era. Just outside the hotel is a large roundabout on which once stood a Cothic-style Russian Orthodox church made of wood. By all accounts, it was one of the most beautiful churches of its kind in the world, but unfortunately it was burned to the ground by those contemptible zealots, the Red Guards.