Harbin Ice Festival

The festival began in 1963 from a local practice: peasants on the Songhua carved lanterns from river ice to light their winter journeys. Since 1985 it has occupied several parks where teams cut hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of blocks from the river to raise palaces, ramparts and thirty-metre pagodas packed with LEDs. Finer snow sculptures occupy Sun Island. It opens in early January and disappears in March without being dismantled.