The annual Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival is Harbin's main tourist highlight. It started about 18 years ago, and has become the world's biggest winter festival. The bitterly cold winters are just right for this festival.
Facts and Highlights
-10 to 15 million visitors annually.
-World's biggest ice sculpture festival (600,000 square meters)
-One of the world's biggest snow sculpture festivals
-Tallest ice edifices: The tallest ice sculptures reach about 46 meters high.
-10,000 workers cut and haul the blocks of ice.
What sets the Harbin festival apart is the scale and size of the sculptures and the beautiful lighting. It is bigger than the ones in Sapporo, Norway, and Quebec.
At first, mainly Chinese participated, but in the last decade, it has become an international festival and competition. As the festival grows in international participation, and as China's economy grows, the size of the snow sculptures and ice architecture exhibits keeps growing. The work going into making these exhibits is astounding, and their size and beauty is amazing.
The lightning effects on the huge ice sculptures in the Ice and Snow World are technologically sophisticated. They use computer controlled LEDs and regular lighting to animate stunning displays of color and design.