As I strolled past the main train station in China’s northeastern city of Harbin, I noticed a Russian Orthodox Church with five small onion domes prominently displayed on the front plaza. The church, built in 1908 as the Holy Iveron Icon Orthodox Church, is currently closed to visitors as it is being reconstructed; the bright new red bricks of the lower floors contrast sharply with its weathered steeples. So this was the Harbin Russian legacy I had heard so much about, I thought. I tried taking a picture of the half-old half-new church, but found that the Manchurian cold had been too much for my phone to bear, so I had to go into the train station and hold my phone under my clothes to revive it. Holy Iveron Icon, like the other remaining Orthodox churches and synagogues in the city, is a ghost from a brief but frantic period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when this city was founded and controlled by Russian settlers and refugees.
Harbin rose from the plains of Manchuria once it was designated in 1898 as the administrative center for the Chinese Eastern Railroad, built by the Russian Empire as a shortcut between the Pacific port city of Vladivostok and Siberian city of Chita. With the railroad, the town quickly became a prosperous frontier city attracting Russian engineers, businessmen, and after 1917, White Russian refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks. Onion domes and Baroque architecture lined grand avenues like the cosmopolitan Kitayskaya (Russian for “Chinese”) Street in the wealthy city center, earning it the nickname “Moscow of the East.” Nostalgic Russians imported other parts of their cultural heritage as well, like the Harbin Symphony Orchestra, now China’s oldest symphony orchestra. At the same time, the opportunities of the railroad attracted Chinese laborers. The Chinese laborers were given less pay than European workers, were denied municipal rights, and were forced to live in unsafe settlements outside the city center that were quarantined in times of epidemic. However, the laborers still found reason to leave the crumbling Qing dynasty to seek opportunity here.
The fortunes of Harbin Russians would soon change though, as newly Soviet Russia disowned them and the Chinese regional government sought to reassert its authority. In the 1930s, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria made life harsh for Chinese and Europeans alike. By the 1960s, almost all of Harbin’s Russians had fled to places like Australia or the United States. China’s subsequent Cultural Revolution destroyed most of Harbin’s architectural and cultural heritage from the brief time of Russian settlement.
Beginning in the 1980s, China’s central and provincial government sought to reclaim elements of this erased past. In 1997, a newly restored St. Sophia Cathedral in the former wealthy city center was reopened as a museum of local history after years of neglect and use as a warehouse. Today, St. Sophia is a prominent tourist spot, and other acknowledgements of Harbin’s Russian past are posted everywhere. St. Nicholas Cathedral, where Russians once were married and attended Sunday service, was burned down by Red Guards in 1966 but can be found reincarnated all around the city. Within just a couple weeks of living here I have already seen it brought back to life as an ice sculpture at Harbin’s famous International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, as a model made of turf near the square where the original once stood, and as an engraving on every manhole cover I have seen thus far in the city. A full-blown replica of it has been built at a Russian theme park about 45 minutes outside the city.
While all the original Harbin Russians have passed away or emigrated, there is a large population of new Russians, this time arriving as humble guests and not privileged settlers, some living in the same foreign students’ dorm as myself. China has signaled that it wants Harbin to become a center for modern Sino-Russian relations, with the Russian Consulate General scheduled to reopen here this year after closing in 1962. Much has changed in the past 56 years. As fireworks whistle and thunder outside my room for Lantern Festival (Yuanxiao Jie), signaling the end of Chinese New Year celebrations, it is clear that this former outpost of Russians searching for riches or refuge has become deeply, fundamentally Chinese—and that the relics of faith left behind by homesick Russians have been reimagined as quaint ornaments for this Chinese metropolis.