Dear city, proud and graceful

            Harbin is partly known for its old buildings, which is strange because they aren't that old.  Most of the famous ones were built between 1900 and 1930, making them about the same age as the Minnesota house I grew up in.  They are also partly famous for being good-looking.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that Harbin's buildings aren't beautiful, but I'd say that they're not so beautiful as to justify a visit to the city.

            I've developed these convictions through the past nine months.  They did not prepare me for a conversation I had with a taxi driver a few months ago.  He started with the same cookie-cutter questions, where are you from, working or studying in Harbin, etc.  I then asked him if he was a local, and after he answered that he was, I asked him whether he liked his hometown.

            "Yes, I like it," he said.  I nodded in agreement.  He paused, added, casually, "Harbin is so beautiful."

            I stopped nodding and swiveled my head to look at him.  Images of some of Harbin's older building's flashed before my eyes, buildings whose walls advertise the KFC's and Zaras that live inside, that have often been painted over in garish yellows and greens, and that cycle upon cycle of hard winters and hot summers have discolored.

            "Oh...  some parts of Harbin are beautiful, I think," I stuttered.   "And it's certainly a very interesting city, historically."

            "Mhm, so beautiful," he said, half to himself it seemed, eyes on the road.

            My thoughts swirled in dismay.  Here was a local born-and-bred, plain-spokenly proclaiming the beauty of his hometown, and, I could tell from his demeanor, with no motives for doing so other than the fact that he truly believed it.  He was saying this about a city that I had decided was, while a truly fascinating place to live in, one of the least attractive I had ever seen.

            Part of Harbin's ugliness just comes from being a big, developing city that has had little attention paid to it by the Central government.  Entire parts of the city are swathed in construction activity, paper and plastic waste litter the streets, and city slums are not uncommon.  But a big part of my problem with Harbin is just the way its older buildings are maintained-- and the part that irks me most is that these buildings are often seen as adding to the city's beauty.

            The usual strategy for renewing these buildings seems to be to slap on a fresh, thick coat of paint, usually in a bright yellow with white highlights, completely at odds with the architectural style.  There's also a tendency to use many of these older buildings as homes for fast-food chains and name-brand stores with the aim of capitalizing on tourist foot-traffic.  Other old buildings are used as homes for government offices, closed to the public.

Originally the home of the head of the Harbin Railway Department, now a KFC.

           It's hard to know why exactly I hate that Harbin yellow so much.  Sometimes I tell myself that it's because it's obviously not the color used when these buildings were first built (locals have confirmed this).  Or I say to myself that it's the boring uniformity, that they use the same colors over and over.  But I think it must simply have to do with my intense suspicion that buildings with any degree of European features should definitely not be painted that color.

            To that taxi driver, I suppose it's just the opposite-- those old buildings better be painted yellow, otherwise they're just not going to look right.  Maybe seeing a fresh coat of yellow paint being applied to an eclectic mix of renaissance, neoclassical, and baroque styles makes his heart sigh.

            Disclaimer: Americans fell into a similar trap with our neoclassical architecture.  The classic Washington DC tour mandates a stop at the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, which borrow from Ancient Greek and Roman styles.  Their uniform white marble appearance gives them a solemnity and gravitas, conjuring images of the Acropolis or Rome's Pantheon.  The problem is, the relevant experts now know that those Greek and Roman Buildings didn't originally look like that; they were probably painted in what we would now judge to be a kitschy riot of color.  Only after centuries of ruin were they reduced to their current, recognizable state.

The Parthnenon, as it once looked.

            To my chagrin, I identified something that bothered me about Harbin, only to realize that it's just a different form of some practice that American's perfected long ago.

***

            I only started to feel affection, and then a deeper love for Harbin, when I started to learn more about its history.

            As a major city, it isn't very old.  It took off in the late 1800s after the Russians built it around the Trans-Siberian railroad, which connected European St Petersburg with the port of Vladivostok in the Far East.  Many of these famous buildings were constructed by Russians after Harbin became a major trade and transportation hub in the early 1900s; French, Japanese and Italian consulates, stores, synagogues and churches, mansions for lumber magnates and their families popped up around the city at speeds comparable to a Wild West boomtown.   Harbin had an advantageous location for trade, positioned on both the banks of the Sungari River (or, in Chinese, the Songhua) and the railroad.

            Russians continued to settle in the city, thanks to the favorable economy, but the population really boomed after the Bolshevik's 1917 revolution, when over 100,000 White Russians fled the newly formed Soviet Union to Harbin.  The city attracted immigrants from other European countries, as well as Japanese.  A sizeable Jewish community also settled in Harbin at this time, many of them fleeing persecution in Europe and the Soviet Union.  In the 1920's and 30's, the number of foreign consulates in Harbin reached 16, including an American one (the need for agricultural machinery in Heilongjiang at the time was high, and it was largely American firms that met the demand).

            Lilian Grosvenor Coville, then the wife of the Harbin's American Consul General, gave a sketch of life in the Manchurian city in a National Geographic article in 1933.  She described the main street of Harbin, Central Street, which was then known as Kitaiskaya Street, and which is now the main tourist attraction of Harbin, thus:

"Looking down Kitaiskaya, the main street of Harbin, from one of the many Balconies of the "Moderne" Hotel, Harbin appears a rather shabby continental town.  The buildings are strongly built of stone or concrete, with tall double windows and doors ready for the below-zero weather, when the ground is frozen solid four feet deep for months, and Siberian winds blow.  The signs above the stores are in Russian and the letters look as if they were turned backward, until one has spent an evening learning the fairly simple Russian alphabet."

            According to accounts I've read, while there was little racial or ethnic tension in Harbin, the city was highly segregated.  The Chinese residents lived on one side of the train tracks, and the Russians on the other.  Buildings on the Russian side were generally built large and blocky, while the buildings the Chinese lived in were smaller and often had details in the Baroque architecture style, something they supposedly picked up from their new Russian neighbors.  Despite their historical and architectural interest, these buildings are in severe disrepair today; on the verge of collapse, they are not a major tourist attraction.

***

            Harbin at this time was a cultural force as well as an economic one, especially when compared to the creatively repressed cities of the Soviet Union.  Opera and theater companies, poets and novelists, Russian language periodicals and libraries all thrived.  Even such acts as traditional Ukrainian musical comedy and a company performing only in the Tatar language had their day in Harbin.

            One poet writing in Harbin in the late 1920's and 30's was Valery Pereleshin, originally from Irkutsk, Siberia.  He left Harbin sometime around 1940, escaping the fate of some other Russian Harbin intellectuals of that time, the Gulags.  He wrote of Harbin:

Dear city, proud and graceful,

There will come a day

When it won’t be remembered

That you were built by a Russian hand.

Though such a destiny be bitter,

We will not lower our eyes:

Remember, aged historian,

Remember us.

            I'm not sure if Pereleshin was wrong or right.  You can't visit Harbin without having its foreign heritage put on show. Central Street's European style buildings are painted brightly, just in case you weren't sure which ones they were.  Half of them are filled with "Russian product" souvenir shops peddling made-in-China matryoshka dolls.  The occasional Russian style restaurant is sprinkled here and there in the old neighborhood.

            Despite this, it doesn't really seem to be the case that many people engage all that deeply with this history when they come to Harbin.  In some way this doesn't surprise me. The late 1920's, when the foreign population was probably at its peak in Harbin, weren't really so long ago.  But there's something about this history that feels so distant, like it could only have happened on another planet.  I think this is mainly due to the lack of diversity in Harbin today; it's just tough to imagine a Harbin where half the inhabitants are white.  This fact, and the multiple upheavals of the last 100 years of China's history make Old Harbin feel not just old, but ancient.

            In some selfish way, I can't say I mind that I seem to be somewhat alone in my interest in Harbin's history.  Walking around older parts of Harbin, perhaps passing the Italian consulate around 5:00pm when the golden hour makes that yellow hue slightly more bearable, and imagining for a moment the Consul General stepping out the door and climbing into his coach, it feels like I am accessing some deeper layer to Harbin, a layer that often just lies there unnoticed as China's hyper-speed modernity zooms along.  Now, after getting to know Lilian Coville and Valery Pereleshin I have to admit to myself from time to time, Harbin is beautiful.

In front of the former Czech Consulate, now abandoned and unused.