Visitors to China’s “ice city” Harbin line up at museum

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Visitors to China’s “ice city” Harbin, visitors were lining up quietly in long queues in front of a museum of Japanese war crimes.

It was a blisteringly cold Sunday morning.

The museum is about an 80-minute subway ride from the city’s center. No one complained about waiting in the cold for more than half an hour.

Harbin has emerged as one of the top tourist destinations this winter.

During the three-day New Year holiday alone, the city welcomed nearly 3.05 million visitors, raking in 5.91 billion yuan ($832 million) in tourism revenue.

The enthusiasm of visitors from across the country toward China’s “ice city” Harbin has remained unabated.

Far from the hustle and bustle at these hot tourist spots in the city, the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by the Japanese Army Unit 731 is located in Pingfang district.

Yet, many visitors came here, and a lot of them were tourists from other parts of the country, dragging their luggage behind them, apparently to catch a train or flight afterward.

Some were holding bouquets of white or yellow chrysanthemums, which are traditional Chinese symbols for mourning.

To keep visitors warm, some local residents also set up stalls to give hot ginger tea and heating pads.

Unit 731 was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base established in Harbin in 1935 as the center of Japan’s biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during the war.

In August 1945, the retreating Japanese invaders destroyed most of the facilities that produced germ weapons. There are reports that it included bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera.

In the 1980s, an exhibition hall was established to strengthen the protection and investigation of the evidence of war crimes, such as their notorious human experiments in the development of germ warfare by the Japanese Army Unit 731.

In 2015, a new museum at the site was opened to the public.

The new museum is divided into six exhibition rooms, displaying relics excavated from the remains of Unit 731’s headquarters.

During the tourism boom, some tourists visited the museum and shared their experiences on social media.

A Douyin user with the handle xiaoshiya, who travelled from East China’s Zhejiang Province, chose the museum as her last stop for her two-day visit to Harbin.

She got recommendations from netizens in Harbin.

The museum announced on Saturday to carry out a strict reservation system, starting from Sunday, to maintain its daily maximum reception to 12,000 visitors.

Since the New Year holiday this year, the number of visitors to the museum has surged significantly, said the announcement.

On Monday, the museum issued another announcement that it was opening the museum on Mondays to better address the situation.

Inside the museum, there was a pillar-shaped installation with names of victims on the top and some running numbers below.

In silence, visitors laid down China’s national flags in memory of the victims who lost their lives to the atrocities committed by the Japanese Army Unit 731.

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