A Russian City in China
Harbin is a city in the far northeast of China, best known (these days) for its yearly ice sculpture festival, which features entire buildings built out of ice blocks. However, as far as history and culture, Harbin is notable for being a meeting place of two cultures: Chinese and Russian. The city is still full of Russian style buildings, and is supposedly one of the most foreign-feeling cities in China (both architecturally and as far as urban design).
This is because of a series of events that took place from the late 1800s up until World War II, but things really kicked off as far as Russian Harbin with the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia. Historically, oftentimes after revolutions people and governments will retreat to strongholds, such as post-Castro Cubans in Miami or the Kuomintang retreating to Taiwan after the Communists took over in mainland China, and that’s the case here as well. In short, when the revolutions started in Russia in 1917, the upper classes they were revolting against went to a lot of places — big populations went to cities like Berlin, Istanbul, Paris, and New York — but a sizable group ended up in China, mostly in Harbin, which was a far cry from such metropolises.
In 1896, Imperial Russia and China signed a treaty that allowed Russia to construct a railroad through Manchuria, the northernmost region of China. That railroad, known as the China Eastern Railway, or CER, was a leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which would connect European Russia to Vladivostok, Russia’s port on the Pacific.
