When snow gets deeper, when waterways become skating rinks and clothing gets thicker, you know it's that time of year again: Harbin is about to take its place on the world stage.

Every winter, an avalanche of visitors from home and abroad descends on the city in far northeastern China to see the country's most spectacular ice and snow shows.

The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival starts on Jan 5 and ends at the beginning of March every year, overlapping some of China's most important traditional holidays.
 

Ice and Snow World in Harbin attracts tourists from home and abroad every year. [Provided to China Daily]

Ice and Snow World in Harbin attracts tourists from home and abroad every year. [Provided to China Daily]

Tourists enjoy the wonderland of ice from a horse-drawn carriage. [Zhao Tianhua / For China Daily]

 The festival's star attractions, its ice and snow sculptures, never fail to amaze, breaking records with their scale and lending themselves to ever more spectacular illuminations. Thanks to these unique, fleeting works of art, wintertime in Harbin is a kaleidoscope of color.

Even the most grand and intricate of the works, a crystal-clear castle carved from ice that gives off different colors through the night, had its genesis in the implement that itself gave birth to almost all ice-of Harbin's chilly industries: the ice lantern.

It was widely used in the bitterly cold Songhua River Basin. Fishermen and farmers used it for outside illumination when they fished or fed horses during the night.

"The authorities soon worked out that this very simple, everyday article was an asset to local cultural life," says Zhu Xiaodong, deputy director of the Harbin Ice Lantern Art Exhibition Center.

The first ice lantern fair was held in Zhaolin Park in downtown Harbin in 1963. The aim was to bring cheer to people in the depths of the bitterest winters, Zhu says.

"Since then, the fair has become an annual ritual, and diverse activities related to ice and snow have gradually sprung up."

Ice and snow permeates almost everything in this city of 10.7 million people, at a latitude of 45 degrees north.

The locals are, by and large, fearless when it comes to low temperatures and they delight in making the most of nature's pure, crystal gifts.

Zhu is one of them. As an ice sculptor he has taken part in the shows for more than 30 years. In that time, everything has changed, except the source of the ice, he says.

"We usually get the ice for sculptures from the Songhua because its flowing water gives more dense ice that is more crystal-clear than artificial ice."