Haerbin, Heilongjiang province, China

An overnight 1,000 km journey East on a crowded, cigarette smoke polluted train brought us from Manzhouli to Haerbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province, part of the region once known as Manchuria.  The area is no stranger to foreign influences having been controlled variously over history by China, Russia and Japan.  And following the Russian Revolution of 1917, a large number of refugees flooded into Haerbin, giving the city a partly Russian character that it retains today in its historical buildings and Russian shops in the old town centre, now renovated and turned into pleasant pedestrian malls popular with Chinese and Russian tourists.

We strolled at dusk down the long, tree-lined mall on Zhongyang Dajie, and dined at Tatoc, an atmospheric Russian restaurant that opened its doors in Haerbin for the first time in 1901.  We had the Bortsch, prawn hotpot, vegetable salad, and Russian sausage pizza with icy cold Haerbin beer.  It was all excellent, and well after dark when we tottered up the steps from the Tatoc to take a taxi back to the Wang Jiang Hotel down past Stalin Plaza, but first stopping for a block of Ukrainian chocolate to have later with our coffees (Traveller’s tip: don’t buy Ukrainian chocolate – it’s not good).

Possibly the most impressive historical building in Haerbin is the beautifully restored Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia, originally built in 1907.  The unrestored interior houses the Haerbin Architecture Arts Centre, featuring the history of Haerbin in a large display of black and white photographs.  We admired the Church from all directions, then sat in the surrounding plaza for half an hour to people-watch and listen to the pleasant Russian orchestral music wafting down on the warm breeze from the loudspeakers mounted in the spires above.  As darkness descended we moved on to Tatoc for another excellent dinner, this time ordering the cabbage rolls stuffed with minced pork and the mixed stewed vegetable hotpot.   

Haerbin is bounded to the north-west by the wide Songhua River; on the other side is the sprawling, pleasant 3,800 hectare Sun Island Park.  We spent Saturday afternoon there, wandering along the paths winding between lawns and trees now sporting their finest autumn colours.  We chanced upon a small village of old, authentic Russian cottages, originally the 1950s dachas (summer houses) of Russian businessmen working and living in Haerbin at the time.  The river dock was only a short stroll away, and from there we caught a ferry across the Songhua back into central Haerbin.  We disembarked in Stalin Park, crowded with visitors strolling along the wide riverside boulevard still decorated with hundreds of fluttering Chinese flags put up for the recent national holiday week celebrations.  And from there, with dusk approaching again, it was just around the corner to Tatoc ….