"We spent about a month refining the outline, drawing it in using CAD (computer-aided design), and marking the key points," said Wang Qian, the overall director of the project and a teacher at the university's mechanical and electrical engineering school. "The design needed to be possible to recreate, and be aesthetically and artistically pleasing."

Despite the extreme cold, students were enthusiastic and proud of the completed work, which took around two hours to create.

Making a splash

In the past three decades, Yu Xiaofeng has never missed her daily swim in the Songhua River, even when temperatures in Harbin recently dropped to as low as — 20 C.

Yu, 61, a retired civil servant, is famous among winter swimmers in the city.

"I was born in Harbin and fell in love with swimming in my childhood, but until 1994, I never thought I could swim in the freezing Songhua River," she said. "In the late autumn of that year, I found some of my colleagues swimming in the river and decided to give it a try."

"It was not very cold at that time," she said. "However, when the weather became gradually colder, I found that I had adapted to the freezing water."