Khabarovsk
— — the city the river bends to meet.
Not only on a wall.
“A Far Eastern city held above the Amur, where the river runs wide enough that the far bank reads as another country, and is. The bluff promenade looks across to the Chinese floodplain. Seven time zones east of Moscow and closer to Beijing than to it. In winter the Amur freezes solid; in summer the embankment fills with families and the long northern evenings.
Khabarovsk, 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.
Khabarovsk sits on a high bluff above the Amur River in Russia's Far East, about 30 kilometres from the Chinese border and roughly 8,500 kilometres east of Moscow. It was founded as a military outpost in 1858 and named for Yerofey Khabarov, the 17th-century Cossack explorer who first charted the Amur basin for Russia. The city is the administrative centre of Khabarovsk Krai and counts around 610,000 residents. The Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the river here on the Khabarovsk Bridge, the same span pictured on the 5,000-rouble banknote.
The Amur is one of the great rivers of Asia, running over 2,800 kilometres along the Russian-Chinese frontier before turning north toward the Sea of Okhotsk. At Khabarovsk it is more than two kilometres wide and carries a deep silt-brown colour in summer. The bluff above it is the city's signature view, a long embankment lined with benches, where people walk on summer evenings until the light finally goes. In winter the channel freezes solid and ice fishermen drill holes through to the river below.
Khabarovsk has one of the sharpest seasonal swings of any major Russian city. Winter temperatures regularly fall below minus 25°C and the Amur freezes from late November into April, opening as an ice road across to Bolshoi Ussuriysky Island. Summers run warm and humid, with thunderstorms drifting in from Manchuria. The city sits at a latitude near that of Marseille but holds a continental climate closer to Winnipeg's. Locals reckon the two best months are late May and early September.