The largest festival of its kind in the world, the Harbin Ice Festival features massive ice sculptures that are illuminated at night. The festival originated in Harbin’s traditional ice lantern show and the garden party that takes place in winter, which began in 1963.
It was interrupted for a number of years during the Cultural Revolution but has since been resumed when an annual event at Zhaolin Park was announced on January 5, 1985.
In 2001 the Harbin Ice Festival was merged with Heilongjiang’s International Ski Festival and got its new formal name, the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.
In 2007, the festival featured a Canadian themed sculpture, in the memory of a Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. It was awarded a Guinness Record for the world’s largest snow sculpture: 250 meters long, 28 feet (8.5 m) high, using over 13,000 cubic meters of snow.
The composition consisted of two parts: the “Niagara Falls” and the “crossing the Bering Strait” (the latter depicting the migration of the First Nations). In 2014, the festival celebrated its 30th anniversary with the theme “50-Year Ice Snow, Charming Harbin”.
Various fairs, competitions, and expos were held from December 20, 2013, to February 28, 2014. In 2015, the 31st Harbin Ice Snow Festival opened on January 5 and was themed “Ice Snow Harbin,
Charming China Dreams around the world with an opening ceremony, firework show, ice lanterns, birthday parties, snow sculpture competitions, and expos, as well as winter swimming, winter fishing, group wedding ceremony, fashion shows, concerts, ice sports games lasting from December 22, 2014, to early March 2015.
At the 35th annual festival held in 2019, the festival’s most popular attraction, the Harbin Ice and Snow World, took up over 600,000 square meters and included more than 100 landmarks. It was made from 110,000 cubic meters of ice and 120,000 cubic meters of snow.
The festival also included ice sculptures by artists from 12 different countries competing in the annual competition. With its 36th year in 2020, this festival is presently viewed as one of the world’s top winter celebrations, joining the positions of the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan,
Canada’s Quebec Winter Carnival, and Norway’s Holmenkollen Ski Festival. In 2020 the sculptures are produced using roughly 220,000 cubic meters of ice blocks, all pulled from the close by Songhua River.
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