In January 2001 I again flew to China, this time to visit the Ice Festival at Harbin. The exchange rate in February 2001 was 12.80 Yuan to £1.

After an overnight stop in Beijing we flew with China Air to Harbin which is one and half hours flying time from Bejing. I think the pilot thought he was driving a sports car, he started off down the runway before we had even sat down!. But the times I have been to China and taken flights and trains, the transport has always left and arrived on time. We discovered that on all internal flights there is an airport tax of 50 Yuan.

Arriving at Harbin we were met by our guide Zhao Yang, none of us could pronounce this and she told us to call her Chow. We drove through a snowy wonderland into the city of Harbin. We are stopping at the Holiday Inn.

Chow and her assistant Nancy

Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang province and it is 238 miles northeast of Beijing. Its Manchurian name means 'where the fishing nets are dried'. The average temperature stays below freezing for five months of the year. Until the turn of the century it was just a fishing village. Then the Manachu Dynasty agreed to let Tsarist Russia build a branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway through Harbin. With the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 about half a million Russian emigrants fled through Siberia to Harbin, consolidating the Russian appearance of the city with stucco houses and churches with onion domes.

From 1932 to 1945 Harbin was under Japanese occupation, followed by one year under the Soviet army. In 1946 the Chinese Communists took control of the city.