Harbin International Ice Sculpture Festival opens in China, despite Corona, photos
The 37th Harbin International Ice Sculpture Festival in China is open to visitors, and features frozen towers, palaces and castles, and the Harbin Festival, held annually in Heilongjiang Province, northeast China, is one of the largest of its kind.
According to the British network BBC, it features a display of tall figures of ice, and this year it will host activities such as skiing, ice hockey, ice soccer, speed skating and alpine skiing competitions.
With entry to China restricted due to the emerging coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, it is expected that domestic tourists will make up the majority of visitors, and the festival had begun in 1963 and was interrupted during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and was resumed again in 1985.
The Chinese have been preparing to participate in this festival since last December, when about 300 ice miners, many of them construction workers and farmers, built tall ice structures in preparation for the festival's opening.
To build the frozen city, tens of thousands of ice blocks were estimated from the frozen Songhua River, which is a kilometer wide, which runs through Harbin, and then the blocks were trucked to the festival venue, where they were used to build life-size castles, pagoda temples and ice bridges.
Workers wore rubber knee-high boots, down jackets, thick gloves and hooded hats to protect their ears from freezing temperatures, and their daily work continued from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. as they placed blocks of ice on top of each other to build walls.
Workers then shaped, trimmed and cut them to size using saws, pickle forks and teeth, and the Harbin Ice Festival will continue until February 25, 2021.
