Animal ears and pom-poms on fuzzy hats adorn tourists’ heads on the streets of the frigid northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, which is enjoying a surge in visitors driven by social media.
Photographs and videos taken at the city’s landmarks flood platforms such as TikTok counterpart Douyin and Instagram-esque Xiaohongshu — many featuring tourists from the warmer south.
They are affectionately known as “southern little potatoes,” a reference to their alleged smaller stature and cutesy winter gear that contrast with the area’s stereotypically coarse character.
Photo: AFP
A search for “southern little potatoes visit the north” racked up more than 428,000 notes on Xiaohongshu.
That is where Chen Xiting, who works in e-commerce in southern Guangdong Province, said she was inspired to visit.
“It’s the quickest way young people get trip recommendations,” Chen said.
Photo: AFP
She said she had noticed a sizeable number of fellow southerners.
“I heard quite a bit of Cantonese, which we’re very familiar with, today at tourist sites and on the street,” said the 29-year-old, wearing a hat with dog ears and with only her face exposed to the air.
Liu Rong, a student from Sichuan Province, said that the city’s push for more southern tourists was clear from the surge in videos about Harbin he often watched with his wife.
“These years, especially this year, Harbin’s cultural tourism has placed a lot of importance on paying attention to us southerners,” Liu said.
Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang, one of three provinces that make up the Dongbei (northeast) region, where temperatures can reach minus-30°C during winter.
Bordered by Russia and North Korea, it is one of China’s poorest provinces, but the first five months of last year saw the operating income of Heilongjiang’s cultural, sports and entertainment industries rise nearly 60 percent year-on-year, official data showed.
Tourists spent 154 billion yuan (US$21 billion) in the first half of last year, up 171 percent from the first half of 2023.
Popular novels and dramas set in the northeast have also helped spark a travel boom to the region.
“A lot of southerners, who we call ‘little potatoes,’ came over here for travel and made our Harbin very trendy,” said Emily Liu, a local tour guide.
The online fame has been good for the travel business, said 30-year-old Jiang Zhonglong, energetically gesticulating in front of his tripod just meters away from Liu.
He started working for a Harbin-based travel agency three years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and said business was now much better.
“So many little friends, southern potatoes, tourists have all come here,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS