In the past 26 years, Yu Xiaofeng has never curtailed her daily swim in the Songhua River, even when temperature recently dropped to as low as -20 C in Harbin, capital of Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.

Yu, 55, a retired civil servant, is famous among winter swim enthusiasts 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."

"Because it was not very cold at that time, I finished practice that was quite different from before," she said. "When the weather became gradually cold, I found that I had adapted to the freezing water in the winter."