Andrew Higgins reported from the Chinese towns of Enhe and Ergun, near the Russian border, where the temperature fell below minus 22 Fahrenheit in December.

Published Jan. 4, 2026

Updated Jan. 5, 2026

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been waging war for nearly four years on the western edge of his vast country to preserve what he sees as a vital part of the “Russian world,” citizens of Ukraine who speak Russian and have blood ties to Russia.

More than 3,000 miles to the east, however, Russia has already lost a centuries-old foreign outpost of its language and culture — a remote patch of northern China entombed in ice and snow.

Set up by the Chinese government, nominally to protect the folk traditions and identity of China’s tiny Russian minority, the “ethnic Russian township” of Enhe has lots of birch trees, thick snow, Siberia-style log cabins, Cyrillic script and vodka.

Map locates Enhe in Ergun area of Upper Mongolia, China.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5842222&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310900#49720220)

“If a woman marries a chicken, she follows the chicken, if she marries a dog, she follows the dog,” he said, using a Chinese idiom reflecting the traditional view that women must bend to their husbands.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5842222&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310900#49720221)

Russians first started arriving there in large numbers in the 19th century after the discovery of gold deposits. Russians managed gold mines as well as the construction and operation of a railway line while Chinese laborers, nearly all single men, poured in for work on Russian-led ventures. Many married Russian women.

More Russians arrived after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, with anti-communist “white Russians” settling on the Chinese side of the border in the belief that communism would soon collapse in Russia and they would be able to return home.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5842222&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310900#49720222)

Russian culture in Enhe survives largely as a folkloric caricature designed to draw Chinese tourists. It has been kept on life support in a local museum featuring samovars, Russian nesting dolls, Stalin plaques, a wooden sauna and wax models of Russians wearing antiquated traditional dress.

A big wooden table has been piled with a display of Russian cuisine — bread, sausages and barbecued meat on skewers, all made of plastic.

A guide showed off an old vinyl music album with Cyrillic writing, describing it as the work of a “famous Russian musician.” It was a Soviet bootleg of an Elton John album.

Mr. Li, the township chief, understands only a few words of Russian and speaks Chinese at home with his wife, another ethnically mixed descendant of early Russian settlers, and his son. He said they celebrate Orthodox Easter, but “only as a cultural holiday” that “has nothing to do with religion.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5842222&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310900#49720224)