Find Winter Fun at Longqing Gorge Ice Festival
Itching to see the ice of Harbin but don’t feel like traveling too far outside Beijing for distance or Covid reasons? Thankfully, there’s a solution to fulfilling these icy dreams: the Longqing Gorge Ice Festival.
Held every year from Jan 15 to Feb 28, it basically functions like a “mini” Harbin Ice Festival. And despite its much smaller scale, it still has some truly breathtaking displays.
Located in Yanqing District, it takes about one and a half to two hours to get to Longqing Gorge, depending on traffic. Given the frigid temperatures this time of year, I’d recommend booking an official trip or a private car rather than relying on public transport – waiting around for a bus in the cold isn’t ideal.
Through a magical tunnel to a frozen land of magic
Tickets to get into the festival go for RMB 100 and, after arriving at the ticket office, it's about a 15-minute walk up to the gorge. If you don't feel like walking, you can pay an extra RMB 10 to take a shuttle bus.
Along the pathway, you'll find an array of animal and insect lantern sculptures that verge on the bizarre and definitely look better illuminated up at night. Think koalas riding a banana, a pig doing the splits, and an angry-looking starfish – it's pretty unusual, to say the least.
Why is there a pig doing the splits!?
After crossing two bridges and taking in a beautiful view of the gorge you'll arrive at the Ice Festival, which consists of two main parts: the outside area and the "inside" area – still technically outside but covered and slightly warmer.
Outside there are multiple lantern sculptures, light-covered trees, and light displays including a whole mountainside that looks amazing at night. There are also a number of food stalls selling snacks and a small café that offers a brief respite from the cold with hot drinks like instant coffee, milk tea, and almond milk.
Follow the magical tunnel of lights and you'll enter the inside area and lantern exhibition. Without a doubt the most impressive part of the festival, there are hundreds of ice and snow sculptures on display here. Strings of lights give the illusion of stars while planet-shaped lanterns hang from the ceiling.
Bing Dwen Dwen doesn't look as cute when he's made of ice
This year's theme is the Beijing Winter Olympics, so there are of course lots of Olympic torches and replicas of the winter mascots carved from ice on display.
Like Harbin, there are also life-sized ice temples and palaces, shot through with a variety of fluorescent colors. But the jewel in the crown of the exhibition has to be the 70-meter frozen waterfall which is truly amazing to behold.
An interesting feature of this year's festival is what appears to be a COVID-19 themed display complete with an ice Covid cell and ice figures in PPE that I first mistook for astronauts.
Astronauts or PPE-laden medics? You decide!
It takes around two hours to cover the whole festival, so I'd recommend going in the late afternoon/early evening so you can see the gorge in daylight followed by the colorful lanterns at night. In the daytime, you can also go chair skating on the frozen lake which is a much less busy option than other popular frozen lakes like Houhai.
For those who do decide to go to the festival, just a friendly warning to make sure you bundle up because it does get significantly colder than central Beijing – especially once the sun has gone down. I'd also recommend investing in some touchscreen gloves. My hand was completely frozen after constantly removing my gloves to take photos!
There's even an icy lake that can rival Houhai as an ice skating spot
Though not quite Harbin by any means, Longqing Gorge Ice Festival is well worth a visit and is a great opportunity to escape central Beijing for the day.
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Images: Katie Coy, Sammie Coxon
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