The Sino-Russia Pedestrian Street (Zhongsu Boyi Jie) is the social centre of Manzhouli — a long shopping and restaurant strip where Russian and Chinese businesses stand side by side. The signs are bilingual, the menus dual-language, and on any given evening you'll hear Russian spoken as commonly as Mandarin. Russian traders come across the border to stock up on Chinese goods; Chinese tourists come to sample Russian food and buy amber jewellery.
The restaurants here are worth exploring. Russian borsch, black bread, and smoked meats appear alongside Mongolian hotpot and Inner Mongolian lamb dishes. The evening street scene, when the neon comes on and the outdoor restaurants fill up, is lively and unpretentious. This is where Manzhouli's genuine cross-border culture is most evident — less staged than the Matryoshka Square, more honest about the economic reality of a border town where two countries have been trading for a very long time.