OK, I take it all back - Beijing looks as if it might actually be able to produce a "blue sky" Olympics after all. After a dull and hazy start to the day, yesterday - 1st August, one week before the official opening of the Games - turned into an absolutely peachy day, just gorgeous, one of the best I've ever seen in Beijing (although it did turn soupily humid for a while in mid-evening); a day, indeed, quite unlike any I've ever seen here in August before.
In fact, it was a day quite unlike any I have ever seen before in this city at any time of the year. The sky was elaborately streaked with thin, high, wispy clouds, and was a deeper, crisper blue than I've ever known before.
No haze of pollution at all, for the first time in decades?? Well, hardly any. From the rooftop terrace of The Bookworm (the monthly social for the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China) we marvelled at the view: all the buildings along Jianwai and the East Third Ringroad were visible in full detail, their illuminated names readily legible. 2 or 3 miles of crystal-clear visibility might not seem so amazing in many other countries, but here in Beijing it is A FIRST.
Well, the last of the migrant workers who staff the city's major construction sites have now been banished, so all these sites are finally at a complete standstill (it was eerie to walk past the huge Sanlitun SOHO project and find it mothballed, completely silent - when only a week or so ago I had watched it teeming with ant-colony activity), and that's probably given a huge boost to the air quality. I gather that the radius of factory closures has been extended to take in the edge of the neighbouring provinces as well as the whole of the enormous Beijing Municipality. And, yes, there were healthy doses of rain on Wednesday and Thursday evenings that have done a lot to freshen things up.
But the transformation achieved yesterday was just uncanny; and you have to start suspecting that the Chinese really do have a secret weather-control machine. I just can't work out how a few more anti-pollution measures and a bit of timely cloud-seeding can affect the cloud patterns and the humidity (and the temperature!) so dramatically as well.
The journos (and we hangers-on) on The Bookworm roof were boggling in wonderment and disbelief at yesterday evening's sky. We were scarcely less amazed than Arnold Schwarzenneger at the end of Total Recall [SPOILER] when ancient atmosphere-generating machinery below the Martian surface is triggered into operation and he suddenly sees a blue sky on Mars!
Indeed, it was so improbably, unbelievably wonderful that I couldn't help but find it also a little bit sinister. I was uncomfortably reminded that the appearance of vivid skies over Manhattan every day in Vanilla Sky [SPOILER] really should have tipped Tom Cruise off to the fact that he'd died and gone to heaven (or, at any rate, to a 'virtual reality' depiction of how he would have liked his life to be).
Hmmm, today has dawned even more perfect. Damn it, I don't care how they're doing it. I'm going for a run!
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