A Tale of Two Temples: Nation, Region, and Religious Architecture in Harbin, 1928-1998

Harbin is located on the upper reaches of the Sungari River, and . . . is a gathering place for merchants, travelers, and refugees from Asia and Europe, where the languages, customs, beliefs, and goods of travelers and immigrants mix together.”¹ This description of Harbin’s multicultural environment, written in 1928, justified the imposition of a Chinese national narrative onto the city and the surrounding region. To study Northeast Asia is to inhabit a periphery of not just one region but several. The conference that spawned this article testified to this fact: Specialists on Russia, Korea, China, and Japan all contributed expertise on the region, and none could form a complete narrative of the place without the others. Other minorities, ranging from Poles, Jews, and Armenians to Manchus, Ewenki, and Mongols, also contributed to making this region unique and contested. In telling one small aspect of Harbin’s twentieth-century story, I focus on the city’s multicultural past, how it has been claimed by different peoples, and how this polyethnic history is reemerging as a new sense of regional identity becomes—perhaps—viable as an alternative to the nationalist narratives that have shaped Harbin’s first urban century.

Among the numerous cultures that have left their mark on Harbin, two—the Russian and the Chinese—dominate. Competition and negotiation between these two great cultures have largely defined the city’s history. Nowhere is this interplay between Slavic and Sinic more visible than in Harbin’s architecture, especially in the design of the city’s many religious buildings. Among the dozens of churches, temples, and mosques, the Harbin Confucian temple and the Cathedral of St. Sophia stand out as especially symbolic of the Chinese and Russian communities, respectively. The differences between them are obvious to the eye. The similarities that connect them, though, seem to outweigh those differences: both were built in the first third of the twentieth century as houses of worship that, at the same time, served as beacons of culture in a frontier region. Finally, both have been converted into museums that celebrate, in an ironic twist, the multicultural nature of identity in Northeast China and in Northeast Asia.

These two structures are bound together, strands in the tangled fiber of Harbin’s history. The Confucian temple was a key component of the attempt by Chinese nationalists to claim the city as Chinese after seizing power in the wake of the Russian Revolution.² The St. Sophia church resisted this attempt, part of Russian efforts to preserve Harbin’s Slavic soul. This simple story of dueling traditions is complicated by its reprise in the 1990s when, after neglecting St. Sophia’s for years, the Chinese authorities suddenly and unexpectedly rehabilitated the church. Reopened in 1997, St. Sophia’s now serves as the centerpiece for Harbin’s current attempt to develop as a tourist center in Northeast China that emphasizes the city’s regional pasts, not just its national ones.

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Chinese officials in the 1920s used architecture and city planning to accentuate the fact that Harbin was now under Chinese control. To borrow the phrase made famous by Eric Hobsbawm, they invented a Chinese tradition in Harbin: the impression that not only was Harbin now a Chinese city, but it was also tied to a long historical Chinese past.³ The Harbin Confucian temple (kong miao) was constructed between 1926 and 1929 and provided an officially funded, Chinese-styled center for official functions and state celebrations, all emphasizing the Chineseness of the city.⁴

Several elements of the Harbin Confucian temple make it significant in the attempt to endow Harbin with a Chinese patina. First, it conveyed an image that was visually and obviously Chinese, employing traditional Chinese architectural aesthetics that stood out against both the Russian onion domes and the indigenous Euro-Chinese hybrid “Chinese Baroque” style that was common in...