Manchurian journey, frozen beauty
Beneath a deep blanket of snow, Jeremy Atiyah finds a sad region of China
trying to emerge from its century of suffering
Published: 30 January 2000
Beautiful but fragile, and probably destined to vanish at the first sign of
spring. That's how she strikes me. When I first see Maomao she has frost on her
Sophia Loren eyelashes. We are a thousand miles north of
Peking,
in a land of bitter winter, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, throat-stinging
air and rivers stiff with ice.
How can people enjoy themselves when they need to put on three pairs of
trousers and a face-mask whenever they go out? "This is
Manchuria,
land of suffering," I want to say. "This is where I live,"
explains Maomao, before leading me to the scene of a giant ice festival on the
river. I see children clutching live fireworks, red-cheeked girls posing for
photographs, old men jumping into bobsleighs, toddlers eating toffeed fruits on
sticks. On the
Songhua River
itself, so solid that it can take the weight of thousands, not to mention the
occasional truck, we encounter horse-drawn sleighs, teams of huskies, and
sellers of fireworks, silly hats, hot drinks and postcards. Behind a screen,
fat women with painted lips dare to strip off and swim in a pool made of ice.
And in the distance, I see miraculous structures built from translucent bricks:
four-story towers, replicas of the
Great Wall of China,
Orthodox churches, laughing Buddhas, gigantic fruits and animals. I have
finally reached
Harbin, the last -
and coldest - city in
China.
What on earth am I doing here? Just clanking in on the train from
Peking,
I have spent one whole night watching
Manchuria pass me
by, jostling with men in black leather jackets in the restaurant car, slurping
noodles and shouting for more beer. "Beneath this vast land lay countless
sad lives," the Japanese artist Taeko Tomiyama wrote, viewing Manchuria
from the same train, "...each of those lives, holding more suffering than
can ever be told, was now just a clod of earth..." Between carriages, I
found the windows feathered over with thick, opaque ice.
To be soaked in the cold blood of Chinese Communists, Japanese militarists
and Russian industrialists: I worry that this may be
Manchuria's
only destiny. Last night in my compartment, three Chinese men lolled drunkenly
together on the bed opposite mine. "You're Russian," slurred one.
"What are you buying here?" From under the duvet I tried to imagine
the original pristine wilderness of
Manchuria, the
prairie and the forest, a world of deer, wolves and tigers, populated by
hunters, fishermen and ice princesses.
But now, when I eventually ask her about history, Maomao - an ice princess,
of sorts - only smiles. What can she say? She is 20 years old, wears platform
shoes, carries an ultra-slim mobile phone and inhabits the lobbies of
Harbin
hotels in the hope of bumping into Japanese tourists. Less than 400 years
earlier, I would like to tell her, it was bands of tribal people from her
homeland that rose up to challenge the might of the Ming court and its imperial
capital Peking.
Instead, here by the banks of the frozen Songhua Jiang, I ask her if she is
Chinese or Manchu, to which she responds by raising her watercolour- painted
eyebrows. Does she care that in 1644 a Manchu boy named Shunzhi entered the
Forbidden
City and claimed the mandate of heaven to rule
China?
Or that
China
was then ruled by foreigners from
Manchuria for nearly
300 years?
Probably not. She has aging parents to care for, and Japanese classes to
attend, and warm clothes to buy. But this
China
of the Manchus - of men who shaved their foreheads and wore their hair in long
braids at the back - is the
China
I have in my head, the
China
trespassed over a century ago by Russians from the north, driving their
trans-Siberian railway to
Vladivostok,
then invaded by Japanese from the south.
I saw it all last night, sitting wide-eyed, watching this land of dirty
snow, steam columns and freezing rail-lines slip past under yellow station
lights. First stop was the city of
Shenyang,
which I had visited 11 years before - also in the dead of winter - in the days
before the ice floes of Chairman Mao's
China
had begun to thaw. That time I had gone hungry, shuffling round Dickensian
streets in a green Chinese army great-coat, choking on sulphurous air, slipping
on iron staircases. That had been Chinese Communism, and it had smelt of rotten
cabbage - but fear and loathing was nothing new to
Shenyang.
It was here, on
18 September 1931,
that a group of Japanese army officers had set off explosives on a stretch of
railway line, providing themselves with the excuse for a full-scale attack and
the occupation of
Shenyang - by
Chinese reckoning, this is the true beginning of the Second World War.
Had that been the worst of
Manchuria? Not quite.
Hours later, my fellow passengers were snoring like trucks. And outside, there
came creaking into view the city of
Changchun.
Xinjing, the Japanese called it, or "new capital". Here, on a bitter
day in March 1934, Puyi, the last emperor of
China,
donned his dragon robes for a grotesque enthronement ceremony granting him
lordship over the Japanese puppet state of
Manchukuo.
I remembered only what Puyi himself witnessed from a train window 11 years
later: "Crowds of Japanese women and children, screaming and
shouting," he wrote during his own attempt to flee the Communists in 1945,
"were pushing towards the train as they wept and begged the gendarmes to
let them pass. At one end of the platform the Japanese gendarmes and soldiers
were brawling..."
I shiver, and try to sleep. Hours later, finally arriving in
Harbin,
the most northerly of
China's
great cities, I look up to see mounds of sooty, wind-blasted snow and the
weakest of watery suns from the train window. The temperature hovers near -30C,
but crowds of hatted people with steaming mouths stomp down staircases to the
platform as we pull in; grand buildings emerge dimly through the freezing fog.
The Modern Hotel, where Maomao will stumble across me, is astoundingly
ancient. The Russians built it in 1906, having put
Harbin
on the map courtesy of their trans-Siberian railway. Here I will breakfast
every morning under vulgar gilt statues, chandeliers and plaster reliefs. In
the streets immediately outside, I see signs on department stores and
restaurants in Cyrillic letters as well as Chinese. Later I lunch with Maomao
in a Russian restaurant where excellent bread is served and knives and forks
are de rigeur.
If anyone should be unfortunate enough to settle in this skin-peeling
Siberian wilderness, it will be the Russians, naturally. After the 1917
revolution, 100,000 of them came to live here in exile, building not only
hotels and department stores, but Orthodox churches by the dozen. Small numbers
of this old community still survive. I visit their domed cathedral, now full of
trendy young Chinese inspecting a photographic display of
Harbin's
early days as a Russian railway outpost. I see languorous cabaret stars,
Russian families picnicking by the Songhua Jiang, horse races, Model-T Ford
motor cars, and six-storey skyscrapers. Postcards from the early 20th century
describe
Harbin as the "most
civilised place in northern
Manchuria".
Maomao, of course, cares little for all this. Nor does she see irony in her
own fervent wish to reach
Japan,
despite the fact that 60 years ago her country was being colonised and
brutalised by Japanese invaders. "Shall we go to KFC, or do you prefer
Chinese hot-pot?" she asks, gently. The cobbled, pedestrianised streets of
downtown
Harbin are as pleasant as
China
gets, even under sheets of blackened, corrugated ice. She takes me underground,
through endless bunkers, once built to defend
Harbin
against Russian missiles, now thriving clothes souks. Later we visit food
markets where - in addition to winter cabbage - I am astounded to see summer
mangoes and aubergines on sale.
The suffering is over, I tell myself. Surely. Even here in northern
Manchuria.
Maomao takes me to dinner where we eat jiaozi, steamed parcels of mincemeat
wrapped in pastry, surrounded by tea-drinking families in padded coats. She is
solicitous to refill my tea cup. She worries whether the grated potato and
chilli salad is to my taste. Outside in the darkness, the temperature continues
to drop, and the ice festival cranks into top gear. I hear firecrackers
exploding. I say nothing, but it occurs to me that tomorrow I will be out of
here. Maomao, on the other hand, will be wandering alone through these frozen
streets, hoping to find her Japanese tourist, perhaps, before the arrival of
spring.
Getting there
The writer flew courtesy of British Airways (tel: 0845 7222111), and his
travel inside
China
was arranged through
China
specialists CTS Horizons (020-7836 9911). British Airways flies non-stop to
(and from)
Beijing four times
weekly; flying time is around 10 hours. Return fares in February, after the
Chinese New Year, are from £ 420 including taxes.
A three-night Beijing Package based on two sharing (single supplement
£ 50) also costs £ 420 through CTS. Booking conditions apply.
Valid until 25 March.
CTS can book travel between
Beijing
and
Harbin by train or plane. The
"soft sleeper" (ie first-class) return train journey would cost
£ 106; travel time is about 14 hours each way. The return airfare from
Beijing to
Harbin
is £ 163. CTS can also book transfers.
Where to stay in Harbin
The five-star Shangri La costs £ 59 per night with breakfast. The
writer stayed at the three-star Modern Hotel, at £ 43 per night with
breakfast.
Harbin sightseeing
You can book a personal city tour in Harbin (seven hours) with an English-
speaking guide, taking in the ice carvings, the snow carvings, the Tiger Garden
and Sofia church, for £ 69 for one person or £ 47pp for two
to five people.
