Special supplement: Remote Heilongjiang promotes cultural industries to melt isolation

Bright, colorful paintings hanging on the walls of the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong might look similar to other modern artwork. But closer examination reveals their distinctiveness - all depict a land and people before outside the common knowledge of an average Hong Kong resident. The land is Heilongjiang, the northernmost Chinese province, known for its deep snow and dense forests.

Hong Kong and Heilongjiang couldn't be much further from each other on the map of China. But any distance melted away as a delegation from the province, headed by the director of its culture and communication department Yi Junqing, presented the cream of indigenous culture to the international metropolis.

The mini-exhibition, inaugurated on Tuesday afternoon, offers a taste of a land that is, to use the words of the director, "beautiful, rich and mystical". But culture is playing second fiddle to commerce. Behind the attractive showcase is a single-minded effort to lure investment and broaden the scope of economic cooperation in art and culture to create something more prosaic - revenue and jobs.