The replica St. Nikolai Church is part of the new Russian Culture Gardens, which aim to reconnect Harbin, China to its Russian-influenced past. (Courtesy CET-Harbin).

The park is not open yet, but already it feels contrived. Cracked stone carvings—made to look falsely historic—litter the grass, and the wood of the buidings looks weatherworn without ever having battled the elements.

One type of wood, an authentic imported Russian pine, makes up the jigsaw rafters of the newly recreated St. Nicolai church. While the original church marked Harbin’s city center, the new St. Nicolai is in the city’s suburbs, where the Russian Culture Gardens is being constructed. This 65,000-square-meter, 40 million yuan ($5.8 million) park is expected to attract 300,000 visitors annually. Yet it is hard to say whether its tangible lack of authenticity will enable visitors to connect with Harbin’s Russian-influenced past, or simply move the city closer to the tourist-oriented, profit-maximizing China of today.

Harbin’s history enthusiasts are proud of the park. “Even though many of us were not even alive then, we think of the time of Old Harbin as its best,” said Wenming Zhao, secretary of Harbin’s Historical Society. Harbin, now the 10th largest city in China, was once a group of small villages that came alive in 1898 with Russia’s construction of the China Eastern Railroad, which connected Harbin to the Russian port city of Vladivostok. In the 1920s, as immigration increased, Harbin became one of the world’s most international cities. At its peak, foreigners and native Chinese equaled each other in numbers, with a total of 160,000 foreigners from 33 different countries, including the largest population of Jews in the Far East. Most of the foreigners left in the 1950s, when China protested foreign influence.

But they left their marks on the city, from Russian onion domes to the first piano in Harbin and a tradition of hospitality for which the Chinese Northeast—and especially Harbin—is still known. “The people of Harbin have kept a spirit of accommodation and openness, according to the legacy of those times,” said Shuxiao li, deputy di- rector of Harbin’s Center of Jewish Studies, a program devoted to studying Jewish heritage and its influence on certain Chinese cit- ies. Harbin is known in particular for its acceptance of Jews when they faced discrimination around the world. “Harbin is a city...where [Jews] encountered no anti-Semitism,” reads a plaque at Harbin’s Jewish Museum of Heritage and Culture. Another boasts a quotation from Henry Kissinger, who called the Harbin people’s treatment of the Jews “a glorious record of world humanitarianism.” The Jews who lived in Harbin are gone now, but their grandchildren come back to places like this museum to see their ancestors’ lives played out in black-and-white photo montages.

While these non-Chinese visitors have a personal reason to come to Harbin, li believes that developing the city’s history will inter- ested a wider audience. “There is a kind of complex emotional tie between Harbin people and foreigners that cannot be easily melted,” he explained. To him, Russian Culture Gardens is more than just a themed complex. “It is a place people will come to enjoy their leisure, to escape, to remember,” he said, suggesting a modern purpose for recreating the city’s past.

Many of China’s historically-themed destinations are accused of being tourist traps, untrue to the cultures they supposedly represent. One such park in Beijing features miniature replicas of famous world sights: an Egyptian pyramid, made of marble bricks, stands next to replica Twin Towers in a miniature Manhattan. “We’re probably never going to go to these places,” admitted Yi Tang, a student at Harbin Institute of Technology. “But it’s good to get a taste, even if it’s not the real thing.”

Russian Culture Gardens is not original, but no pretense exists here. Visitors know they are seeing something fake, but the falsity hurts no one, and it promotes—even honors—Harbin’s diverse his- tory. In a country that is creating new structures and technologies by the second, tradition sometimes must be reconstructed where it has not been preserved. Harbin can never truly recreate the way it was in the 1900s, but it can make something new that echoes the past. As China races to modernize, maybe fake is the most effective means to capture real history.

Kanglei Wang is a sophomore in Branford College.

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