January 30 – Hardin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival

Posted on January 30, 2019


The world's largest ice and snow festival isn't the famous Sapporo Snow Festival, in Japan, but rather the Hardin Festival in northern China. 

How big is it?

Weather permitting, it's held for a long time. This year parts of the festival are open from December 24, 2018, until February 28, 2019. ("Weather permitting" means cold. Like, really REALLY cold, with an average daytime temperature of -13 C [8 degrees F] and nighttime lows of around -30 C [-22 F].)

The main area, the Ice and Snow World, spreads out over more than 600,000 square meters, features more than 100 landmarks, and is made of about 110,000 cubic meters of ice and 120,000 cubic meters of snow!



Notice how different it looks in the day (above)
and at night (below):



It takes about 10,000 people to create the massive Ice and Snow World!

There's an international ice sculpture competition with artists from 12 different nations!



There's an opening ceremony with fireworks, ice lanterns, regular-folk competitions, winter sports, concerts, fashion shows - and even a group wedding ceremony!





A newlywed couple enjoying the ice sculptures
after their group wedding...

The ice sculptures are considered the largest in the world - the record-breaking largest-ever ice sculpture was created in Harbin in 2007.

And there are 2,019 snowmen apart from the festival, just chilling down by the river! (One for every year C.E., notice.)



There are stairs and walkways and bridges and even slides...



Annnndddd the festival attracts about 18 million visitors! More than $4 billion dollars USD (29 billion yuan)! 

So...yeah, it's really big!

For more, check out this slide show.


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