The cab hurtles at breakneck speed along the bridge over the frozen Songhua River and a brightly glowing suburb on the northwest bank appears. A few kilometres away, some of the town's buildings are discernible - a towering skyscraper, a soaring archway and a host of monolithic buildings. Everything is bathed in warm green, pink and yellow lights, and spotlights broadcast the town's presence by flooding the sky overhead.
I can't help but wonder if this is yet another industrial suburb - the kind springing up outside most of the mainland's major cities. Harbin, in the forbidding frozen land between North Korea and Siberia, is northeastern China's industrial centre, so perhaps this is a new subdivision devoted to cars, machinery or electronics.
As the cab races nearer, the town comes into closer view and the shocking reality hits me: the skyscraper, the arch and the buildings - they're not real. They're all ice sculptures; enormous, exquisitely detailed and painstakingly crafted.
The 'town' is, in fact, what I had set out to find - the Harbin ice sculpture festival - yet I had never imagined anything of this scale. It's a fairy-tale winter wonderland, furnished with jaw-dropping works of ice art. I let out an audible gasp and the cab driver, probably used to seeing amazed tourists, chuckles.
As history has often proven, building projects in China are rarely small. Whether it's the Great Wall or the Three Gorges Dam, things must be bigger and grander - it's a matter of cultural pride. So, while ice festivals in Sweden, Japan or Quebec may boast some amazing sculptures, they seem quaint compared with what Harbin has to offer.
The festival opens at the turn of the year and runs until the ice melts, usually in late March. Even though winter temperatures routinely hit minus 20 degrees Celsius, tourists flock from south China, Japan and Russia, and the city comes alive with skaters and tobogganists.