Manzhouli
— — a steppe town built in two alphabets.
Not only on a wall.
“A border city on the Hulunbuir grassland, where China meets Russia and Mongolia near the eastern edge of the steppe. Street signs run in three scripts. The architecture along Zhongsu Pedestrian Street borrows from St Petersburg: onion domes, cornflower facades, a square of giant matryoshka dolls. In January the air sits at minus twenty-five and the wind comes off the steppe with nothing in its way.
Manzhouli, 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.
Manzhouli is a border city in the Hulunbuir prefecture of Inner Mongolia, on the steppe near the Russian and Mongolian frontiers. Population is roughly 300,000. It sits at about 700 metres of elevation on the eastern edge of the Mongolian Plateau. The city grew around the Trans-Manchurian Railway crossing, opened in 1901, and remains China's largest land port of entry with Russia. Roughly 70 percent of overland Sino-Russian trade passes through here by tonnage of goods, much of it timber and minerals moving south.
The architecture leans Russian, by intention. Through the 20th century the city changed hands several times, Russian then Japanese then Chinese, and the historic core kept the imperial-Russian style of the railway era. Zhongsu Pedestrian Street is lined with onion-domed pastel facades, restored or rebuilt since the 2000s for the cross-border tourist trade. Matryoshka Square holds a 30-metre wooden matryoshka, listed by Guinness as the world's largest. The St Sophia replica on the rise above the centre was finished in 2009.
The Hulunbuir grassland has a sharp continental climate. January means run to minus twenty-five Celsius and the steppe wind has nothing to break it. July is mild, in the low twenties, and the grass turns green for a short window from June through August. Hulun Lake, an hour south by road, is the fifth largest freshwater lake in China at 2,339 square kilometres; it freezes solid through the winter. Local Daur and Mongol herders still graze sheep on the rolling steppe within sight of town.