Harbin is a forbidding, dark-at-4pm town with roads covered in ice. The next stop north is Russia and gazing out of the window of a hotel on the edge of Stalin Park - across the frozen Songhua River to trees rimmed by frost - it's easy to imagine that this is what Siberian labour camp inmates would have looked out on. A crow flaps across the sky, a breeze sends flurries of dusty snow spinning from the surface of the glacial river and the thermometer outside the room reads minus 20 degrees Celsius.
But from across the river comes a twinkling of lights, phosphorescence smudging the sky like a neon aurora borealis, the source of which turns Harbin from a bleak end-of-the-world town of frosty exile into a winter wonderland.
This year, the Heilongjiang provincial capital celebrates its 26th Harbin Ice and Snow Festival and it's bigger and better than ever. The town is connected to the festival site by cable car and bridge but who needs to ride in a taxi when you can walk? The ice on the river is thick enough to drive a bus over and enterprising locals are offering rides on sleds pulled by hairy dogs whose muzzles are covered in frost or on a horse and cart fitted with metal blades instead of wheels. Even better, there is an inexpressible joy in feeling metres of ice squeaking beneath your feet - and a brisk walk keeps you warm.
The best time to arrive at the festival - which began on January 5 and will last as far into next month as the weather will allow - is an hour before dusk, allowing enough time to enjoy the unadorned and flawless beauty of all that ice before multicoloured neon strips flicker on. Entrance is a hefty 200 yuan (HK$250) but this only seems expensive until you pass through the enormous gates (made of ice, of course) into the carnival beyond.
Inside there are icy terracotta warriors, frost-bound Japanese castles, glacial Russian churches, frigid pyramids and an enormous Forbidden City. Everything is encircled by a twisting Great Wall that is as smooth as glass and almost as sturdy as the real thing.
It is said the Inuit people of the Arctic have 20 words for snow; 20 superlatives would be insufficient to describe the ice sculptures in Harbin. They are unexpectedly massive and impressive whether lit or unlit but they feature astonishing attention to detail and artistry. Every warrior's face is different and there is a carved lion's head knocker on the Forbidden City door, a serene smile and jewelled earring on the head of a Thai temple Buddha and a cornucopia of flowers and grapes at the top of a Roman Corinthian pillar.
It's too much to take in at first sight and spending hours here in such temperatures would be impossible without the cafes, built like wooden chalets, in which visitors hunch over hot chocolate and mulled wine and nurse fingers and toes back to life. If you tire of marvelling at details and gazing at the sculptures as they change colour, there is plenty of people-watching to be done: locals sliding down frozen icy chutes, shrieking and slipping in high-heeled shoes or eating iced fruit and hot sweet potato bought from vendors who crouch over their stoves to keep warm.