No matter how far apart, families make all efforts to gather at Spring Festival, as it is the most important holiday for Chinese people. Wang Yun, a woman from Anqing in eastern Anhui province, just made a 3,300-kilometer trip to meet her husband, who is stationed at the border area of northernmost Heilongjiang province.

As reported by CCTV News on Monday, Wang and the couple's two children took trains and planes, traversing four places in the two provinces within two days, and eventually reached their destination — Mohe city, where temperatures often fall below minus 30 to 40 degrees Celsius in winter.

The husband, Zhu Liang, is the instructor of a frontier army unit of the Northern Theater Command of the People's Liberation Army. Ahead of the holiday, he and other soldiers increased their daily patrol from once to twice a day, covering a distance of ten km. The sky often goes dark by 4 pm every day, with the local temperature dropping as low as –40C.

"Ten km isn't very long, but there's snow everywhere. So it takes us 4-5 hours to carry out a patrol," Zhu said. However, he kept the hardship to himself and never mentioned it to his wife.

The two children also understand that their father's work is to "protect the safety of all".

During this reunion, Zhu took his family to the country's northernmost outpost. The outpost now has a guard booth and heaters to keep the soldiers warm.

Not far away stands the boundary marker where Zhu, his wife, and children took their very first family photo.