With temperatures that can plunge below minus 40 degrees Celsius, freezing winds that howl down from Siberia and darkness from mid-afternoon, the town of Mohe might not sound ideal for a holiday. But if its tourist officials get their way, there will soon be an influx of visitors to this isolated town in Heilongjiang province during the bitter winter months.
Strangely, Mohe's sub-arctic climate is putting the tiny town of 40,000 on the map. Less than 80 kilometres from China's border with Russia, Mohe is the mainland's most northerly town and its coldest spot. In February 1962, the mercury dropped to an extremely nippy minus 52.3 degrees, the lowest temperature ever recorded in the country. Winter in Mohe runs from early October to mid-May, and there are only 90 days a year when there isn't frost on the ground. So frigid is Mohe that the average annual mean temperature, minus 5.5 degrees, is colder than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Hong Kong.
Now, Mohe is cashing in on its uniquely icy weather conditions by turning itself into the official home of Santa Claus in China. This week the Father Christmas Village opened in the nearby Beiji Cun, or North Pole Village. It has been modelled on Rovaniemi, the self-proclaimed hometown of Santa near the Arctic Circle in the northern Finnish province of Lapland.
'It's been designed exactly like the village in Finland. It has Santa Claus's house, a post office where people can send Christmas cards with a special Santa Claus postmark and there's a ski run,' says Huang Nana, deputy director of Mohe's Tourism Bureau.
As kitsch as it sounds, especially in a non-Christian country where Christmas was barely celebrated until recently, the Santa village is part of a campaign to make Mohe a more attractive tourist destination in the winter.
'People come here because it's an area of natural beauty where they can escape city life. In the past, they used to come in the summer mainly, but we've noticed more tourists coming in the winter so we want to give them things to see and do. In March, we now have a jeep snow rally and we think that having a Father Christmas Village will enable tourists to enjoy a unique Christmas holiday,' says Huang.
