China's winter - memories of Manchuria

When the plane just landed on a bright sunny day, my friends whom I brought to re-visit Manchuria didn’t quite feel the cold. Yeah, we’d just arrived in the city of Harbin in northern Manchuria in a ‘warm’ minus 11 degree C afternoon. My friends, wondering what the devil for, said it wasn’t really that cold. Yeah, it wasn’t! They expected it to be something more horrible, although they were both having runny noses when they made their cocky comment while wearing their full outfit for our northern expedition. That was the warmest day of our Manchurian trip, they would soon know. I didn’t even wear a hat or gloves and was only wearing a pullover and a convenient down vest coat and a pair of ordinary jeans.

It was the first day of my trip to the North Pole of China many years ago. Moho (or Mohe) was our destination, right bordering river Amur (River Amur (Russian: Peka Amyp) or Heilong Jiang (Chinese:黑龍江)). It took us nearly another week from Harbin to reach there, via part of the Hu Lun Bei Er 呼倫貝爾grassland of the Inner Mongolia to reach Jia Ge Da Qi and changed a slow train to Xi Lin Ji, the northern terminus of the railway at the Moho county.

It was also a bright sunny day when we got there. My friends no longer had anything to say about the ‘warmth’ from the sunshine. It was something like minus 44 or 45 that day - still nearly ten more degrees warmer than the coldest temperature recorded there. It was like, however, being cheated by the sun. Right after we stepped outside the house, I assure you, even the craziest man would not be able to spend more than five minutes without needing emergency cheek-and-nose resuscitation. By seven minutes, when I'd tried braving it, I began speechless with chin paralysis. By ten minutes the cold had penetrated through the fifth layer of my clothing and death through hypothermia is the faintest puff of wind away, until we made it to a little shop and rushed all the way to the heater.

I was enjoying it, though. Manchuria is the northernmost part of China that curves upwards into the Russian east Siberia like a sinister eyebrow. In the beginning of the last century, it was where hundreds of thousands of White Russians ended up in exile, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It was said that in the early decades of last century you could easily bump into a Duke or a general of the Romanov monarchy on the street in Harbin and a beautiful young lady selling flowers could be a princess. When I made my way to go inside a very crowded bus to buy a ticket, I happened to see a blonde green eyed girl bus conductor. Was she a daughter of a princess? It is also where the Japanese arrived in China, bent on their failed war of conquest. General Baron Tanaka in his notorious Tanaka Memorial presented to the then new Emperor Hirohito said, “in order to conquer the world we [Japan] must first conquer China. But in order to conquer China we must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia.” At Qiqihaer I met Yashida, a young Japanese university student studying at Tianjin who came to Manchuria to spend his winter vacation to, from what he said, feel the cold and feel the history in Manchuria. I remember that at that time like he was required, like every other Japanese tourist, to report to the Public Security Bureau whenever he arrived at and departed from any places in Manchuria.

Unlike the Russian refugees and the Japanese invaders, I was there only as a tourist to look at the ice, and I remained open-minded as to whether we tourists had a more enjoyable time of Manchuria than the White Russians or Japanese did. It is a place where you can get closer to history, feel the vastness of our country, the coldness of China’s winter in the far north. To me, it is a very romantic place. The romance is somewhat depicted in Mao Ze Dong’s poem titled Snow where he said:

North country scene:
A hundred leagues locked in ice,
A thousand leagues of whirling snow.
Both sides of the Great Wall
One single white immensity.
The Yellow River's swift current
Is stilled from end to end.
The mountains dance like silver snakes
And the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants,
Vying with heaven in stature.
On a fine day, the land,
Clad in white, adorned in red,
Grows more enchanting.

This land so rich in beauty
Has made countless heroes bow in homage.
But alas! Qin Shi-Huang and Han Wu-Di
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang Tai-Zong and Song Tai-Zu
Had little poetry in their souls;
And Genghis Khan,
Proud Son of Heaven for a day,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.

After so many years, pictures and feeling of Manchuria still stay in my memory with fondness and I believe they will remain so for many years to come.