‘Big Bread’ Is Harbin’s Russian Legacy

To reach the bakery of the Qiulin Department Store, a wintertime visitor passes a guarded entryway, crosses a snowy courtyard blackened by a huge pile of coal and walks down a dark cement stairway.

At the bottom is a warm half-basement room where men in dirty white uniforms work amid one of the most delicious aromas known to mankind: the smell of fresh bread.

This is where they make da mianbao --”big bread.”

The bread, as famous a souvenir of Harbin as sourdough is of San Francisco, is one of the few remaining legacies of Russian influence in this northeastern city, which once was a major stop on the trans-Siberian railway, a Russian trading post and, after the Russian revolution, a haven for thousands of White Russian refugees. At the end of World War II, the city still had 50,000 Russian residents.

‘We Liked It, Too’

“Originally the bread was mostly for the Russians,” said Wang Shengli, the official in charge of the bakery, “but we Chinese were influenced by them, and we liked it, too.”

There are other signs of Russian influence. Russian architecture is still very much in evidence in Harbin. So were trolley cars--until last year, when the last lines were torn up to speed traffic. But only 20 or 30 actual Russians remain, mostly elderly China-born descendants of early immigrants.

In the lore of Harbin’s people, however, it is the huge round loaves--which sometimes are called lieba , in a Chinese approximation of the Russian word for bread--that stand as “the most prominent tradition left from the Russians,” according to Wang.

Other bakeries in Harbin also make “big bread,” crusty on the outside and moist within. But the award-winning bread from the historic Qiulin Department Store’s original wood-fired ovens is especially renowned.

“Qiulin is the (Chinese rendering of the) name of a Russian man who established this company in the 1930s,” Wang explained. “He went bankrupt, and a British bank took it over and sold it to a British corporation.”

“Then Japan occupied northeastern China and the Japanese took control. In 1945, after Japan was defeated, a state-owned Soviet corporation started managing it. There were still many Russians here. In 1953, the Soviets turned it over to the Chinese government, in return for a payment.”

One Master Baker

Li Binghu, 62, is the only remaining master baker from the early years.

“I started working here in 1948,” Li said. “The other bakers were Russian.”

Wang described Li as “already half-retired--but we didn’t let him leave, because we want to preserve the technique.”

Li’s job now is to teach and supervise the younger bakers, Wang said.

The moderately dark bread is made from simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt and hops. The dough is allowed to rise three times before the loaves are baked. It is the hops and the old ovens, fired with scrap wood, that give the bread its special quality, according to the bakers.

“Most bread in China is sweet,” said Wang Lifu, the chief baker. “This isn’t sweet. We use it as part of the main course for a meal. . . . The hops are very beneficial to the health of your stomach, so people with stomach troubles like to eat this bread.”

Sold in Afternoon

The loaves, which weigh slightly more than 3 pounds and sell for about 45 cents, are baked in the late morning and go on sale along with sweeter breads in the nearby department store early in the afternoon. Typically, a line of more than 100 customers, winding up the central staircase of the store, forms before sales begin. The “big bread” always sells out.

One recent afternoon, a young man who had been near the front of the line had a look of great satisfaction on his face as he emerged from the counter with a loaf of the “big bread” and two loaves of sweet dried-fruit bread.

The man said he was a college student who was leaving on vacation the next day to go back to his hometown near the Soviet border.

“I came here to buy bread as a souvenir of Harbin for my parents,” he said.

David Holley, The Times’ Beijing bureau chief, was in Harbin before traveling to Tibet.