China’s ‘ice city’ draws record holiday crowds

BEIJING – The “ice city” of Harbin, the snowy capital of Heilongjiang province in northeastern China, attracted a record number of visitors over the New Year holiday, many of them drawn by the grand and intricate ice sculptures of its annual Ice and Snow Festival. The towering ice structures, illuminated in a dazzling array of lights at night, are built from ice blocks harvested from the frozen Songhua River nearby. This year’s festival helped draw 3.05 million visitors to Harbin during the three-day New Year holiday that ended on Monday, generating 5.91 billion yuan ($826 million) in tourism revenue, the state media agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday. Those numbers exceeded the number of pre-Covid visits in 2019. Growth in the…