Last Updated on: 8th August 2024, 12:15 pm
At -30°C (-22F), you’d think the destination would be desolate and empty. Not Snow Town. Snow Town is a very unique winter holiday destination in China that is extremely popular with the locals, and is regularly booked out, with prices increasing massively during Christmas/New Year and Chinese New Year.
But if you haven’t heard of Snow Town, it’s not surprising. Snow Town (雪乡) is a winter destination in north eastern China that is wildly popular among domestic tourists but is lesser known outside of China and Chinese speaking populations. If you are interested in a winter holiday filled with snow and ice, keep reading to see how you can go too!
Snow Town is the common name for a village that is located in the Shuang Feng forest within a mountainous area in northern Heilongjiang Province. Heilongjiang Province itself is located in north eastern China, on the border with Russia, so in winter, regularly experiences temperatures of -30ºC.
In winter, the area is covered in deep, white, fluffy snow. Visitors can walk through the white, snow covered grounds taking in the scenery of snow covered trees and in the mountains in the background.
“North Eastern China” (东北) isn’t just the “north” “east” of China, but an entire geographical area famous by name in China in its own right for its generous servings of food, warm hospitality, hard working people, and harsh winters. Despite this, they have some of the most fertile farming land in China and is an agricultural region, producing a vast amounts of food for the entire nation. In 2022 it produced 11.3% of the entire nation’s grains alone, some 77,630,000 tonnes. The locals also make use of the winter by creating ice sculpture competitions, which draws international competitors annually, and snow sculptures too.
Being a village in a forest atop a mountain, the village landscape is covered with deep snow each winter, and visitors are guaranteed beautiful, natural, snow covered scenery and a warm bed at the end of the day.
Getting to Snow Town
Snow Town can be reached from Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang. Harbin has its own international airport, and is a winter holiday destination of its own, being the city that hosts the annual ice and snow sculptures (two separate events). Currently, there is no railway betwee Harbin and Snow Town, so tourists either drive there themselves, or join a tour group’s bus. In the 2023-2024 winter period, a public bus service was established but booking it remains logistically restricted to domestic Chinese tourists. It is better to join a tour because the drive takes about 5 hours if you take brief stops, and goes on winding, possibly icy roads up a mountain, and the public bus can stop service at any time, so you will have to manually adjust and make other arrangements.
Snow Town is a seasonal destination which means you can only visit it for few months a year. Within the village, people get around on foot, and getting there requires driving up mountains (sealed modern roads) in minus 30-degree environments, since there are no trains. Even if there were: There are several scenic areas along the way that you would miss out on if you went by train. The logistics of getting there is a little tricky, so people have to join a tour group.
Tour groups leave early in the morning, typically around 5:30am well before the winter sun rises. Plenty of stops enable travellers and the driver to use the bathroom at designated rest stop areas, and a short breakfast and lunch break for breakfast and lunch. The breaks are also for the driver, and travellers are taken on short sight-seeing trips to break up the trip, before you arrive in Snow Town at night fall.
Things to do in Snow Town
Snow Town is a small village with a few local residents, but has become a protected scenic area and is open to visitors, who pay a fee to enter. There are no cars allowed within Snow Town (except delivery vehicles and tour mini-buses), so getting around is all on foot. Visitors park outside in a designated parking lot, and large tour buses drop tour groups off and are transferred to smaller buses there.
The main (pedestrian) street, Xue Yun Boulevard (雪韵大街), is lined with shops and local restaurants selling traditional Chinese food, perfect for a stroll or window shopping.
For those of you who like cultural performances, there is also a theatre that shows a traditional “Two person show”, a show consisting of dancing, skits, and perfomances.
Outdoors, skiing can be available, if the ski facilities are open (being a village that is not too commercialised, most, if not all, businesses are local and whether a particular hotel or restaurant is open in a season, can change for any reason, including the ski facility). The facilities come with lockers and ski instructors for hire, and a conveyor belt to take skiers up the slope.
Visitors can walk around the village to enjoy the sights, or go tobogganing and sledding.
The small creek below flows despite the cold weather. Locals say that when they children, you could drink directly from the water and it tasted sweet.
There are many restaurants selling local cuisine. This particular restaurant below lists their specialties outside: roasted and grilled leg of lamb, lamb racks, lamb kebabs, sticky rice bean buns, hot boiled dumplings, wontons, rice cakes, hot noodles, rice cakes, and steam cornmeal buns.
No holiday is truly complete without trying the local street food: street food vendors sell traditional, local snacks that are energy rich, high in protein and typical of Northern China: This one sells piping hot roasted sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, eggs (yes, roasted!), potatoes, red sausages, and steamed sticky rice bean buns, the latter which are quintessentially Northern Chinese cuisine.
The environment is so cold you can even create your own snow: take a bowl or mug of hot water and in one swift move, throw it over your head in an arc, and watch it instantly dissolve away as snow.
One of the main draw cards is Meng Huan Jia Yuan, a separate, ticketed village of traditional houses covered in snow, and used as the main photo of almost all promotional material for Snow Town.
Other things visitors can see are wild or semi-wild animals in zoos or reserves.
Accommodation
Northern China is very cold in winter and the locals know exactly how to build their buildings to keep it warm. Hotels here offer warm rooms with modern and traditional Kang beds, a feature unique to northern China.
A Kang bed is a built-in brick platform with bedding on top and a fire underneath and internal tunnels connecting to the kitchen and a chimney that allows the cooking fire to not only cook food, but to heat up the bed and the rest of the house. Each Kang can sleep many people depending on the size. During the day, a small table can be placed on the Kang for people to eat or do their work on.
These beds are still used in modern houses today because of their efficiency but some are electric, and hotels with modern versions provide the same feel with modern comforts. The one below is a display home showing the typical traditional, local style homes of people there, created to show tourists the local style.
Some hotels are clusters of small individual buildings with a small number of rooms each, some have breakfast halls, others have restuarants.
How long to stay in Snow Town
Snow Town is a small village, the main street being a pedestrian street and people go everywhere on foot, so the typical time spent there is 1 night and half a day (since you depart after lunch time the next day to head back to Harbin). The surrounding area outside are also packed with things to see. Joining a tour group means you can be transported from one location to another easily, allowing you to see everything in the most efficint time.
How you can go to Snow Town too!
There are a few things that makes visiting Snow Town challenging, especially for non-Chinese visitors. First is the visa requirement. If you have never been to China before, you will need to know how to get a Chinese tourist visa, if you need one. Once you do get one, you will know it can be expensive, and is generally limited to 30 days and might not be worth it for a short trip. If that is the case, then you might be in luck: China now allows holders of passports from a total of 9 countries to enter China for 15 days without a visa, for tourism, family and friend visitation, and business purposes. If you hold a passport from either Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, or Spain, you can take advantage of this temporary trial and visit Snow Town yourself!
The second challenge is logistical: The typical way to go to Snow Town is to join a domestic Chinese tour agency, or use Chinese services to book your own entry ticket, transportation, and accommodation.
Luckily for you, I am pleased to say I have worked with a local tour agency in China and created a perfect 6-day small group English speaking tour to northern China that covers not only Snow Town, but also all the main sights of Harbin too! My tour is a perfect mix of food, culture, history and scenic sights, covering architecture, natural scenery, and the annual snow and ice sculptures and suits all ages and fitness levels! Discounts ar also available for large group bookings!
Register for one of my information sessions on Eventbrite or stay tuned for more information coming shortly!
