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Life in China Harbin
Life in China Harbin | Harbin |
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| China | |
| Sunday, 25 February 2007 | |
 The chicken didn’t stand a chance. Dangling above a pit of hungry Manchurian tigers, one scrawny leg tied to a pole, held at the other end by a girl with the determined look of a ‘revolutionary hero’, the cockerel’s plight would have made Houdini wince.Frantic flapping followed by an eerie silence (from the chicken and crowd of spectators alike) and bam, it was gone, ripped from the pole by a male tiger below that had leapt, paws outstretched, a clear foot off the ground to snare its prey, like a domestic cat clawing at a ball of string. Life is cheap at Harbin’s Siberian Tiger Park. Feeding a chicken to these endangered cats costs just 40 yuan, a goat 600 and a cow, yes a live cow, 1,500. Quite how this helps prepare the tigers for their eventual release into the wild (for that is the stated aim) is unclear. But it certainly helps to draw the crowds to this sanctuary, a place that manages to be both depressing and fascinating in equal measure. The sparse conditions - high steel fences, barren stretches of frosty dirt, and occasional chicken-on-a-string – hardly scream out conservation with a capital ‘c’. You can’t help but think, as you sit, packed into a mini bus alongside other snap-happy tourists, that the Manchurian tiger, a species on the brink of extinction, deserves a little better. Despite this, the sanctuary is well worth a visit – if only to get within touching distance of one of the rarest, and most beautiful, animals on the planet. The tiger park sits 20km outside Harbin, a Russian influenced city and capital of China’s northern most Heilongjiang Province. Famed for its dazzling Ice Lantern Festival, the city has become a popular destination for tourists who brave the sub-zero winter temperatures. And as any visitor will discover, this former fishing village has a lot more going for it besides ice sculptures. The main area of interest centers on Zhongyang Dajie, a cobbled, pedestrian street that runs from the banks of the Songhua River to Xinyang Square. Here, original Russian architecture sits in fading majesty alongside gleaming shopping malls and restaurants. Onion domes dot the skyline and buildings painted pastel blues, greens and yellows hint at the city’s past as an outpost of imperial Russia. It’s the perfect place to stroll, stopping off in the wonderfully preserved Russian Café 1914 for red borsch soup and succulent sausages and browsing the shops for all things Russian.  The center piece has to be the stunning Church of St Sophia, an emerald domed Orthodox church built by the Russians in 1907 and tastefully restored after it was ransacked during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). The sight of this magnificent place of worship, encircled as it now is by crowded five-storey shopping malls and faux-Russian architecture, seems to sum up perfectly China’s rush to modernize and its awkward handling of anything linked to the past.Back outside the city, 20km to the south, lies a relic of history that the Chinese are unlikely ever to forget. The Japanese Germ Warfare Experimental Base – 731 Division was set up in secret by the occupying Japanese forces in 1939 as a place where scientist could carry out research on prisoners of war. More than 3,000 people were exterminated here, killed in the most gruesome fashion imaginable: some were roasted alive or left outside to freeze to death while others were injected with plagues and viruses. The center’s remaining buildings (most were destroyed by the Japanese as they fled Russian forces in 1945) have been turned into a somber exhibit to the crimes committed here. Photos of the notorious 731 army division that ran the camp line the walls while clay models depict hell-like scenes of brutality. One former prisoner, now in his 80s, is on hand to relate his story to the Japanese tour groups that visit the complex. When questioned, he pointed to a grainy black and white photo of two teenagers tied to a wooden pole, staring wild-eyed with fear into the camera. “That’s me on the right,” he said, “I was 19 years old.” As night begins to fall, an altogether different scene unfolds at Harbin’s famous Ice Lantern Festival. Giant sculptures of castles, the Great Wall and even Buddha, dozens of meters tall and carved from huge slabs of ice, are illuminated by multi-colored lights that are threaded through the ice. The result is a scene of dazzling tackiness that is also, somehow oddly beautiful. Tom Mackenzie Tom is a British journalist who moved from Finsbury Park, London, to Chaoyang District, Beijing, at the beginning of the year. Having spent nearly three years as a reporter for a weekly tabloid covering stabbings, shootings and celebrity shenanigans in north London he decided it was time for a new challenge and moved to the capital in a bid to learn the lingo, dabble with some freelance writing and familiarise himself with Chinese culture. |
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