Harbin

Harbin[a] is a sub-provincial city and the provincial capital of Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China.[6] It is the largest city of Heilongjiang, as well as being the city with the second-largest urban population (after Shenyang, Liaoning province) and largest metropolitan population (urban and rural regions together) in Northeast China.[7] Harbin has direct jurisdiction over nine metropolitan districts, two county-level cities and seven counties, and is the eighth most populous Chinese city according to the 2020 census. The built-up area of Harbin (which consists of all districts except Shuangcheng and Acheng) had 5,841,929 inhabitants, while the total metropolitan population was up to 10,009,854, making it one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. Harbin, whose name was originally a Manchu word meaning "a place for drying fishing nets",[8] grew from a small rural fishing village on the Songhua River to become one of the largest cities in Northeast China. Founded in 1898 with the coming of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway, the city first prospered as a settlement inhabited by an overwhelming majority of immigrants from the Russian Empire.[9] In the 1920s, the city was considered China's fashion capital since new designs from Paris and Moscow reached here first before arriving in Shanghai.[10] From 1932 until 1945, Harbin was the largest city in the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.