Ice lanterns bring chills for capital crowds

Ice lantern masters from Harbin work on the ice sculptures at Workers Stadium.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"It's not easy to find the proper ice. We tried Beijing's Miyun and Yanqing, and also Zhangjiakou, but at the beginning of December, ice in those places was not thick enough. So we went north to find ice in Inner Mongolia and on the morning of Dec 5, we were very happy to find that ice there had reached 30-cm thick," he said.

The ice, divided into blocks 1.2 meters long and 1 meter wide, had to be "dried" in natural environment for a day before being put in trucks and transported to Beijing.

Creating the ice lanterns consumed 3,000 cubic meters of ice, which had been transported to Beijing on 100 trucks.

One hundred and fifty craftspeople were sent to Beijing from Harbin, who worked on the ice lanterns on three shifts a day. Later another 30 ice artists arrived so as to guarantee the whole project would be finished by Dec 29.

Fifteen winners of the international ice sculpture competition on Jan 17 and 18 are also presented at Workers Stadium, including The Dream of Emperor Penguins and Lin Daiyu Burying Flowers.

Visitors coming to Workers Stadium can play on the ice rink snow in the daytime, and in the evening, they can either enter the inflatable tents to enjoy the ice lanterns, or watch cloth lanterns from Zigong in Sichuan province.