There is a city that reaches -30ºC without central heating. How do they survive the cold?

Heating habits in Harbin, which is one of the coldest cities in the world, can be useful for those who want to save on energy consumption and reveal a different approach to that of Europeans.

In Harbin, in northeastern China, winter temperatures regularly reach -30°C and, in Januaryeven the hottest days rarely exceed -10°C. With around 6 million inhabitants today, Harbin is easily the largest city in the world to suffer such constant cold.

Long before electric air conditioning and district heating, people in the region survived harsh winters using completely different methods radiators and gas boilers that dominate European homes today.

Now, architecture and construction researcher Yangang Xing, who is originally from Harbon, says he is impressed by the lessons we can learn from these traditional systems. Energy bills are still very high and millions of people have difficulty heating their homes, while climate change is expected to make winters more unstable. We need efficient and low energy consumption to keep us warmthat do not depend on heating an entire house with fossil fuels. Some of the answers may lie in these methods.

A warm bed made of earth

Xing’s earliest memories of winter involve waking up in a “kang” – a heated platform bed made of earthen bricks, used in northern China for at least 2000 years. The kang is less a piece of furniture and more part of the building itself: a thick, raised slab, connected to the family stove in the kitchen. When the stove is turned on to cook, hot air circulates through passages under the kang, heating its entire structure.

To a child, the kang seemed magical: a warm, radiant surface that stayed warm all night. But as an adult one can appreciate how remarkably efficient this piece of engineering is.

Unlike central heating, which works by heating the air in every room, only the kang (i.e. the surface of the bed) is heated. THE room itself may be coldbut people keep warm by lying or sitting on the platform with thick blankets. Once heated, its hundreds of pounds of compacted earth slowly release heat over many hours. There are no radiators, no need for pumps, and no unnecessary heating of empty rooms. And since much of the initial heat was generated by the fires that would be needed for cooking anyway, fuel was saved.

Maintaining the kang was a family task. Xing’s father – a high school Chinese literature teacher, not an engineer – became an expert in building the kang. Carefully building layers of coal around the fire to keep it burning at night was his mother’s job.

But for all its drawbacks, the kang provided something that modern heating systems still struggle to deliver: lasting heat with very little fuel.

Similar approaches across East Asia

Across East Asia, approaches to staying warm in cold climates have evolved around similar principles: keeping heat close to the body and heating only the spaces necessary.

In Korea, the ancient ondol system also channels hot air beneath thick floors, transforming the entire floor into a heated surface. Japan developed kotatsu, a low table covered with a thick blanket with a small heater underneath to keep your legs warm. They may be a little expensive, but they are one of the most popular items in Japanese homes.

Clothes were also very important. Every winter, Xing’s mother made him a brand-new thick, quilted coat, stuffed with freshly fluffed cotton.

Europe had similar ideas – and then forgot about them

Europe has already taken similar approaches to warming. The ancient Romans heated buildings using hypocaustsfor example, which circulated hot air under the floors. Medieval homes hung heavy tapestries on walls to reduce drafts, and many cultures used soft cushions, heated rugs, or enclosed sleeping areas to conserve heat.

The spread of modern central heating in the 20th century replaced these approaches with a pattern that consumes more energy: heating entire buildings to a uniform temperature, even when only one person is home. When energy was cheap, this model worked, even though most European homes (especially those in the UK) were poorly insulated by global standards.

But now that energy is expensive again, tens of millions of Europeans are unable to keep their homes adequately heated. New technologies such as heat pumps and renewable energy will help – but they work best when the buildings they heat are already efficientallowing lower set temperatures for heating and higher set temperatures for cooling.

This highlights why traditional approaches to heating homes still have something to teach us. The Kang system and similar systems show that comfort does not always come from consuming more energy – but rather from smarter heating design.