***If I’m violating any copyrights with this entry, let me know asap and I will remove the photo(s) in question immediately***

    Okay, I know I'm not the only one to get this email because I've gotten it at least twice and probably more. The email (complete with misspellings) goes like this:

There is a town in Northern China that does this every year. It is a great tourist attraction and is always beautiful. Most of them have  

Lights inside and as you can see they are really big.

The town is Harbun, and this is a new set of pics. They get more fantastic all the time. This is the town where the Chinese had that chemical spill a couple of months ago.

    Also included are several pictures of ice and snow sculptures. The sculptures are beautiful, but unfortunately, I don't think any have much to do with the Harbin, China event. The first sculpture is a carriage (pictured at the top) that I had guessed was at a Canadian event. Julian Bayley of iceculture confirmed this, and credited the sculpture to Kevin Gregory of Ice Concepts Inc.  I'm sure he had help, as the piece titled "A Winterlude Fantasy" is apparently 11 feet high and from 25 blocks, but the sculpture is also pictured on the Ice Concepts webpage here: http://www.iceconceptsinc.com/larger-winterlude.html (*NEW* Kevin comments on this sculpture in the first comment below. Thanks Kevin!)

    Then there are six more pictures of various ice sculptures with similar backgrounds (pictured below.) Each has lots of trees, lots of snow, no visible buildings, and sometimes you see a large black backdrop tied to nearby trees. These sculptures are from Fairbanks, Alaska. I haven't found out from when or by who, but these pieces really could only be part of the World Ice Art Championships, which coincidentally, is going on right now. Check out the pictures at www.icealaska.com and you'll see what I mean. *NEW* Checking the past events photos on the Ice Alaska site confirmed that all six of these were from the 2002 event. Check below each photo for a link to its Ice Alaska page.

*NEW* Check here for info on the sculpture above.

*NEW* Check here for info on the sculpture above.

*NEW* Check here for info on the sculpture above.

*NEW* Check here for info on the sculpture above.

*NEW* Check here for info on the sculpture above.

*NEW* Check here for info on the sculpture above.

    The next picture, a dragon, is hard to place except that there is lettering on the building behind that makes me think it's in Japan. It could be Chinese writing instead, but I wouldn't put any money on it. The carving seems to have been put together in the standard Japanese stacking technique as well.

    Finally, there are three snow/ice pieces. The first of these has a Japanese flag in front of it. These all look to be part of the annual Sapporo Ice Festival in Japan. These monumental snow and ice structures are very characteristic of what I've seen from that event.

*NEW* I found a Sapporo Ice and Snow festival site that shows a photo of the dinosaurs sculpture here and another Sapporo site that shows the last building AND the dinosaurs here. Finally, I found a very blurry photo on google of the the first building shown just below here.

    In short, NONE of these pieces look to be from Harbin. If you have any further information about any of these, please share it with us, especially if you can prove that even one of these sculptures is in fact in Harbin, China!

The following comment was on the original blog entry. After some technical difficulties, the blog had to be reconstructed, and this was the only way to keep the original comments.

Anonymous

Hey Dawson, how are you. Greetings from Kevin Gregory. Thanks for showing the carriage and crediting me for it. I did the piece along with Tony Young for the Masters Event at Winterlude in 2003. Hope all is well.

Kevin

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 - 05:42 AM