Heihe
— — two countries reading the same river.
Not only on a wall.
“A Chinese border city on the south bank of the Amur, looking directly across the water at the onion domes of Russian Blagoveshchensk. Heihe sits at the northern edge of Heilongjiang province, where the river marks the line between the two countries. Winter pulls the temperature deep below freezing and the river hardens into a road; summer brings the steamboats back. Cyrillic signs share the storefronts with Chinese characters, and rouble and yuan move easily between them.
Heihe, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Heihe is a prefecture-level city in the north of Heilongjiang province, on the southern bank of the Amur river, called the Heilong Jiang in Chinese. The urban core faces the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk directly across the water, separated by about 750 metres at the narrowest. Heihe's population was about 1.28 million at the 2020 census across its prefecture. The Heihe–Blagoveshchensk cross-river bridge, opened to road traffic in June 2022, was the first permanent road link between the Chinese and Russian sides of the Amur.
The city has a humid continental climate with one of the sharpest annual ranges of any sizable Chinese city. January means run roughly minus 24 Celsius and the Amur freezes solidly enough to support winter ice roads and pop-up markets on the river. July climbs back into the low twenties Celsius with long northern daylight. The first snow tends to fall in October and the spring thaw on the river typically comes in late April. Northern lights are visible from the riverbank on rare clear nights in winter.
Heihe is reached by rail from Harbin, about 560 kilometres south, on a line completed in 1989, and by Aihui airport just south of the city. The Heihe–Blagoveshchensk bridge across the Amur opened to road traffic in June 2022 after years of construction. Before the bridge, the crossing was made by ferry in summer and by buses on the ice in winter. The cross-border trade district along Zhongyang Street keeps signs in Chinese and Russian, and small markets near the river quay sell goods to traders from both sides.