Heihe

Heihe sits on the south bank of the Amur in northern Heilongjiang, directly opposite the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk — the closest pair of cities anywhere on the Sino-Russian border, barely 750 metres apart across the water. Its economy is dominated by that frontier: cross-border trade, customs and logistics through the Heihe port and the Heilongjiang highway bridge, which opened in June 2022 as the first road bridge between China and Russia, together with soybean and dairy farming on the Nenjiang plain, forestry, gold mining, and the bottled mineral water and health tourism of Wudalianchi. Higher education is anchored by Heihe University, a public undergraduate institution tracing back to 1958 and upgraded to university status in 2004; it has about 13,000 students, 43 undergraduate programmes and six Sino-Russian joint-education projects, and was in the Ministry of Education's first batch of China–Russia joint undergraduate training units, sending more than 300 students a year to Russian universities. The city is best known for its Russian atmosphere — Cyrillic shop signs, dalieba bread, smoked sausage and matryoshka stalls — and for the Aihui History Museum, a national first-class museum built on the site of the town where the 1858 Treaty of Aigun was signed. An hour and a half inland, Wudalianchi's chain of five volcanic barrier lakes, lava fields and naturally carbonated cold springs forms a UNESCO Global Geopark that draws visitors for both geology and spa treatments.