Discover Harbin
Zhaolin Park Ice Lantern Fair
兆麟公园冰灯艺术游园会
The original Harbin ice festival, running since 1963 and still held in a small downtown park - intimate, hand-carved lanterns rather than the stadium scale of Ice and Snow World. The 52nd edition used about 2,300 cubic metres of ice across six themed zones.
The story
What makes this place special
This is the original. Harbin's ice lantern fair began in Zhaolin Park in 1963, decades before the big commercial ice park existed, and it grew out of a local habit of freezing water in buckets to make lanterns during the winter blackouts. The lanterns are still cut from Songhua River ice. The park itself is a small, ordinary downtown park named after the anti-Japanese resistance fighter Li Zhaolin, and it is free and open the rest of the year.
What you’ll discover
A compact, walkable park a few minutes from Central Street, filled with smaller-scale carved ice: lantern columns, animals, arches, bridges and ice reliefs, lit internally, with crowds moving slowly along narrow paths between them. The whole fair takes under an hour. The scale is domestic rather than monumental - you look at individual carvings close up rather than walking through ice architecture.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- This is the one to do if you only have one cold evening, or if you have children, elderly parents, or no appetite for a full night outdoors. It is downtown, it is short, and you can walk back to a warm restaurant on Central Street in ten minutes.
- It is not a substitute for Ice and Snow World, and nobody should book a Harbin winter trip around it alone. It is an add-on after dinner.
- Check the opening date. The lantern fair often starts later than the main ice park - in some years not until early January - so a Christmas or New Year trip can find the park empty of lanterns.
- Go late. Crowds thin out considerably in the last hour or two and the narrow paths stop being a shuffling queue.
- The park entrance is on the Songhua River side; combine it with the flood-control monument and the frozen river at the north end of Central Street in the same walk.
When to come
After dark, any evening from early January to mid-February, and the later in the evening the better for crowds.
Getting around
Flat and short, which makes it by far the easiest of the three for a bad knee - no climbing, no long distances, and a heated cafe is minutes away. For a wheelchair, the paths are narrow and get packed with people, and some lantern groups are reached by a few steps or over small ice bridges; a chair can see most but not all of it. Footing is icy and polished in places.
Worth knowing before you go
Go after dark - the lanterns are lit from inside and mean nothing in daylight. Because it is central, it is the easiest ice venue to fit into an evening without a cross-river trip.
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