Zhongyang✽ Street (to insiders Z.Y. Street for short) proclaims itself in the elaborate, neon-lit arch that spans the start of the street. A small plaque hanging from the arch announces: 中央大街建筑艺术博物馆 -Architectural Arts Museum of Central Avenue, a tag that is a bit pretentious for what is Harbin’s high tourism pedestrian street.

The commercial hub of the street comprises restaurants, eateries, souvenir shops and hotels. The further you go down the street towards the river, the grander the buildings become. This is where many of the city centre’s older and grander Russian buildings are, including several palatial structures in the Baroque style (alas, some of these grand old mega-buildings have suffered the ignominy of being sub-divided to accommodate KFC and other fast food operators).

Although Z.Y’s Russianness can be glimpsed everywhere. Place names, shop and restaurant names for the most part are present in both Russian and Chinese. But he Russian imprint on Zhongyang is more profound than this. At many of the street’s corners you can see the Russian architectural influences in the onion domes, minarets and spires sitting atop many buildings.

With Zhongyang’s cornucopia of niteries and gift shops, the street flows with people ever-so slowly ambling up and down the old cobblestone pavements. They are present from first thing in the morning through to and beyond nightfall. But it is at night that Z.Y. Street really comes alive. The street is a thriving heartbeat, and the night beat is a musical one! The melodic sounds of old-fashioned small bands and trios can be heard all along the central thoroughfare. This recurring feature gives Harbin its nickname of Music City (although Harbinites tend to render it in English as ‘Muisic’ City). The musical highlight for me was a solo guitarist playing with great gusto from an upstairs Z.Y. balcony. This ‘muso’ who wasn’t Chinese (possibly he was Russian) was really going off, strutting his stuff for the gathering of visitors below with Jimi Hendrix-like zeal and vigour!

The evening is also the right time to explore Zhongyang Jie’s artists’ nook at the river end of the street. Around dusk every night a contingent of bohemian-looking❇ artists set up their chairs, boards, frames and utensils to drum up some passing business. The crayon-fingered artists, predominantly badly dressed males with straggly long-hair and unkempt beards, invite curious passers-by to have their portrait drawn during a short sitting. The street artists seem to do solid, steady business although there’s always a lot more watchers than there are models willing to fork out the 60-80 CH¥ plus 20 CH¥ for the plastic cylindrical container to keep it safe in. While my partner was having her likeness recreated in pencil and crayon, I checked out the ‘live’ handiwork of the other artists…some were of course better than others (although this might be a matter of taste) but I thought that the quality of drawing along the strip was consistently fairly good.

A discus throw’s distance from the artists’ niche was another, not to be missed attraction, again best visited at night. In a side lane off Z.Y., lit up like Christmas, is one of the busiest, noisiest food hutongs you are likely to experience. Stretching 100 plus metres down the lane are a long line of street food stalls (mostly selling much the same stuff, kebabs it seemed to me). The hutong produced a spectacular light show of colour and a throbbing vibe of noise from competing soundtracks and the din of the stall-holders hawking their fast food ‘delicacies’. But it was the first food stall on the corner bearing the name “Food Supermarket of Quidelia” that attracted the most attention. It was more boisterous than the others, and this was down to the antics of one particular vendor. Taking centre stage was this zany, hyperactive dude in sunglasses and conspicuously large colourful wrist beads (a bit of a fashion trend for young Chinese males). His ‘routine’ consisted of a sudden launch into corybantic dancing❅ to the pulsating street music while twirling a fan (or several fans) in a 360° arc…then seamlessly he would swap the fan for some food tongs, flip a couple of kebabs and then resume his over-the-top, campish dance performance with an undiminished degree of furibund intensity. Quite mesmerising in a WTF way!

Heading westerly up Z.Y. towards the river you will come to a heavy traffic cross-street. The town planners’ solution to this impediment to pedestrian progress was to build an underground pathway which allows those on foot to by-pass the dense vehicular traffic overhead. Known as the “Pedestrian Tunnel under Zhongyang Street”, the tunnel has the additional function of being a secure space for the city’s youth to congregate. Here, the local kids hang-out, skate-board or play ti jianzi (the popular game of foot shuttlecock that many Chinese especially in Beijing are obsessed with). A couple of passageways funnelling off from the tunnel lead to a small U-shaped shopping arcade which caters mainly for tourists.

Footnote: If you get past all of the shops and other vibrantly alive distractions that Zhongyang Street throws at you, there’s a very pleasant riverine park awaiting you at the end. The path cutting through the park provides an enjoyable stroll for those in no rush to go anywhere fast. Neat garden edge-boxes, strategically positioned trees of the Weeping Willow variant and several tasteful marble works of sculpture add to the aesthetic appeal of the park. The other feature of the park worthy of comment is the monument to those Harbinites whose lives were profoundly impacted by the 1957 flood catastrophe in Harbin (honouring both the victims and the heroes of the disaster). The monument, the Flood Memorial Tower, is augmented by a more modern structure, a large semi-circular, columned arch which, in the way popular with contemporary Chinese town planners, produces a nightly kaleidoscope of alternating colours intended to dazzle onlookers.

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✽‘Central’ in Chinese

❇ looking the part with a full ration of “starving artist” street cred

❅ for ‘dancing’ read gyrating wildly in a frenetic manner